Nearly a year has passed since E. Jean Carroll, the former Elle columnist behind the popular and long-running “Ask E. Jean,” filed a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump after he denied Carroll’s allegations that he raped her in the mid-1990s. Carroll first detailed the alleged attack in June of 2019 in an excerpt from her then-unreleased book What Do We Need Men For, which she claims occurred in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman. In the weeks and months following the accusation, Carroll was harassed by Trump supporters online, received death threats, and was fired from her position at Elle after 26 years of writing for the publication.
In January of 2020, E. Jean Carroll and her attorney served a notice to one of Trump’s attorneys requesting a DNA sample to compare to the dress Carroll says she was wearing at the time of the alleged assault. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Justice Department is seeking to take over the defense of President Trump against the defamation suit Carroll filed against him in November 2019. In a court filing, the DOJ stated that Trump was acting “within the scope” of his job as president when he claimed that Carroll lied about the alleged assault, saying “she’s not my type”.