NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge said Donald Trump will get an anonymous jury in rape accuser E. Jean Carroll’s upcoming defamation trial, citing the risk of juror harassment and noting Trump’s reaction to possibly being indicted in an unrelated case.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said the names, addresses and places of employment for jurors in the trial scheduled for April 25 will be kept secret, and they will be transported together to and from and within the courthouse.
Kaplan said an anonymous jury was appropriate “on the basis of the unprecedented circumstances in which this trial will take place, including the extensive pretrial publicity and a very strong risk that jurors will fear harassment, unwanted invasions of their privacy, and retaliation.”
The judge said Trump’s March 18 call for “protest” and to “take our country back” if he were indicted in a separate case over hush money payments to a porn star has been viewed by some as an incitement to violence by the former U.S. president.
Lawyers for Trump and Carroll did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Carroll has said Trump raped her in late 1995 or early 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
The former Elle magazine columnist sued him for defamation in November after he called the rape claim a “hoax,” “lie,” “con job” and “complete scam” in a post on his Truth Social media platform the prior month.
The lawsuit also includes a battery claim under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which lets sexual abuse survivors sue their alleged attackers even if statutes of limitations have run out.
Carroll is separately suing Trump for defamation over his June 2019 denial that the rape occurred.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
