March 11 (UPI) -- A federal judge in New York has blocked Donald Trump from proceeding with a counter-lawsuit against author E. Jean Carroll, who has filed a defamation case against the former president.
Judge Lewis Kaplan issued an opinion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday ruling that Trump's claim that he was acting in his official capacity as president when he made the comments was baseless.
Trump had sought damages and other relief under a New York law that lets defendants quickly dismiss lawsuits filed against them when exercising their rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The back-and-forth lawsuits stem from allegations Carroll had made against Trump in an excerpt from her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, published in June 2019 in New York Magazine.
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Carroll had accused Trump, who was then married to Marla Maples, of raping her in the fitting room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996. Trump denied the allegations and accused Maples of fabricating the accusation to sell her book.
The author then filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in 2019, which the former president has since repeatedly sought to dismiss and postpone to keep it from moving forward
.Judge Kaplan also previously rejected attempts from the Trump administration's Justice Department to step in as the defendant in the case, which would have effectively ended Carroll's legal challenge.
Kaplan said in the opinion on Friday that Trump's counterclaim would not have withstood a motion from Carroll to dismiss it and criticized him for again trying to hold up litigation.
"[Trump's] only claim, in this case, is a single count of defamation. It could have been tried and decided -- one way or the other -- long ago. The record convinces this court that the defendant's litigation tactics, whatever their intent, have delayed the case to an extent that readily could have been far less," Kaplan wrote.
Kaplan added that granting Trump the counter-lawsuit without considering its futility "would make a regrettable situation worse by opening new avenues for significant further delay."
