A New York judge has rebuffed President Trump’s bid to throw out a lawsuit filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accuses him of hurting her career and reputation in denying her claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.
In a ruling made public on Thursday, Justice Doris Ling-Cohan of State Supreme Court in Manhattan rejected Mr. Trump’s argument in a filing last week that New York’s courts lack jurisdiction to hear the case because he was not in New York and did not live in the state when he made the comments that Ms. Carroll says defamed her.
Justice Ling-Cohan noted that Mr. Trump had failed to provide anything — “not even a tweet, much less an affidavit” — to support his position beyond his lawyer’s statement that “the President of the United States has resided in the White House for the past three years.”
The judge also denied Mr. Trump’s accompanying request that discovery in the case be stayed.
Roberta Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, said in a statement that she and her client were “pleased, yet unsurprised” by the ruling.
“We look forward to moving ahead and proving that Donald Trump lied when he told the world that he did not rape” Ms. Carroll and “had not even met her,” Ms. Kaplan said.
“WE MOVE AHEAD!!” Ms. Carroll said on Twitter.
The lawyer representing Mr. Trump in the case, Lawrence Rosen, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Carroll wrote last summer in a book excerpt first published in New York magazine that Mr. Trump raped her in the late 1990s in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in New York.
Mr. Trump vehemently denied the allegations. He labeled Ms. Carroll a liar who was keen to sell a book. He said he had never met her despite a photo that showed them together in the 1980s. He also said he would not have assaulted Ms. Carroll because “she’s not my type.”
Ms. Carroll’s defamation suit, which she filed in November, is one of two that the president is facing in New York. The second was filed in 2017 by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Mr. Trump’s television show, “The Apprentice,” who claims that he kissed and groped her at his office in New York and at a California hotel a decade before he ran for president.
Ms. Zervos is among at least 10 women who came forward during the 2016 campaign to accuse Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Mr. Trump has denied all of the allegations, saying that the women had fabricated them.
In her suit, Ms. Zervos says that he called her accusations and those leveled by other women “totally false”; “made up stories and lies”; and “made up nonsense.”
Mr. Trump has failed so far in his efforts to have Ms. Zervos’s suit dismissed on the grounds that the United States Constitution insulates the president against such litigation.
A New York appeals court, which ruled in a split decision last March that Ms. Zervos’s suit could proceed, said this week that the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, should determine whether Mr. Trump is entitled to the immunity he is asserting.