Carroll's lawyers cite Prince Andrew precedent in Trump rape lawsuit fight

In a Manhattan federal courtroom, a legal battle over time itself is unfolding. E. Jean Carroll's lawyers are defending a New York state law that does something unusual: it temporarily allows people who say they were sexually abused decades ago to sue, even though the normal deadline to file such claims has long passed. Donald Trump's legal team wants the law thrown out, arguing it is unconstitutional. Carroll's attorneys are fighting back by pointing to a ruling the same judge made just a year earlier—in a case involving Prince Andrew.

Carroll, who spent decades as an advice columnist for Elle magazine, first made her rape allegation public in 2019 in a book. She says that in 1995 or 1996, she encountered Trump at an upscale Manhattan department store. What began as a chance meeting, she contends, turned violent when Trump cornered her in a dressing room and raped her. She has brought two lawsuits: one for defamation, filed while Trump was president, and a second one for the rape itself, filed after New York's Adult Survivors Act took effect in November 2022.

When Trump was president and first denied her account, he said she was not his type and that the assault never happened. Now his lawyers are taking a different approach. They are not disputing the facts of what Carroll alleges happened. Instead, they are attacking the law itself. In a filing two weeks before Carroll's response, Trump's legal team argued that the Adult Survivors Act, whatever its good intentions, cannot survive constitutional review. They contend it is too broad, that it arbitrarily revives claims that have expired under the statute of limitations without any legitimate reason to do so. They say it violates due process and represents a clear abuse of legislative power. The statute of limitations for such claims normally expires after five years, they note, and Carroll's own delay in suing should not be treated as an injustice against her.

But Carroll's lawyers have a powerful precedent on their side. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, the same judge hearing this case, rejected nearly identical arguments just last January. Prince Andrew's legal team had made the same constitutional challenge to a different New York law—the Child Victims Act—which allows people abused as children to sue years after the normal deadline. Kaplan ruled against them then. He wrote that the argument against the law's constitutionality had "for good reason" been rejected by every New York state and federal court that had considered it. He called the law a "reasonable measure to address an injustice."

Days after Kaplan's ruling, Prince Andrew settled his case. He agreed to donate to a charity chosen by the woman who said he had sexually abused her when she was 17, and he declared he had never meant to damage her reputation. The settlement avoided a trial and a full airing of the allegations.

Now Carroll's team is asking Kaplan to apply the same reasoning to the Adult Survivors Act. They submitted their response in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday. The question before the judge is whether a temporary window allowing old claims to be revived is a constitutional remedy for past injustice, or whether it crosses a constitutional line by unfairly targeting defendants with claims that have already expired. The answer will shape not just this case, but how New York handles decades-old sexual abuse allegations going forward.