President-elect Donald Trump has been ordered to spend up to four hours answering questions under oath as part of his lawsuit against ABC and host George Stephanopoulos.
Trump filed the defamation suit earlier this year after Stephanopoulos said during an ABC broadcast in March that a jury found him civilly liable for raping former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll at a New York department store in the 1990s.
A jury instead found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her by denying that an assault took place. But Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the trial, in July 2023, wrote: “The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”
On Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisette Reid ordered Trump and Stephanopoulos to submit to depositions that will take place next week. Trump was ordered to sit for an in-person deposition in South Florida, while Reid left the door open for Stephanopoulos to take part remotely.
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“Plaintiff’s deposition will be limited to four hours and shall take place in-person and in this district,” Reid wrote in the two-page order. “Plaintiff’s counsel shall schedule the deposition to take place the week of December 16, 2024.”
“Defendant George Stephanopoulos’ deposition will also be limited to four hours
and shall be scheduled to take place the week of December 16, 2024,” she added. “Counsel will meet and confer regarding deposition logistics for the Defendants, including whether they will be remote or in person.”
Reid’s order goes on to note that “with Election Day now behind us, there is no reason for any further delay.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito via email on Friday evening.
At a court hearing hours before the order was issued, Reid expressed sympathy for defense counsel Nathan Siegel’s “frustration” with the president-elect avoiding a deposition, saying that Trump had a “fairly good argument” to delay during the election but now “should be able to make himself available,” according to NBC News.
After Siegel offered to hold the deposition near Mar-a-Lago, Brito reportedly said that he would “do everything in my power to make the president available,” while cautioning that “there are limitations of my ability to do so,” including logistic concerns involving the Secret Service.
In July, an attempt by ABC and Stephanopoulos to dismiss the suit based on an argument that Kaplan’s remarks meant the rape claim was “substantially true” was rejected in federal court. Last month, both parties agreed to move the start of the jury trial from April 7 to June 9.
Unlike some other legal proceedings that have either been dropped or delayed due to the president-elect’s impending return to the White House, the ABC suit is likely to continue during Trump’s second term since he is the plaintiff and the case is a civil matter.
