NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump’s legal professionals gained’t be allowed to inform jurors subsequent week that he’d prefer to testify at a rape trial however would possibly resolve towards it as a result of he desires to spare New York City from logistical burdens posed by his presence, a federal decide stated Thursday.

“Mr. Trump is free to attend, to testify, or both. He is free also to do none of those things,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in an order 5 days earlier than the beginning of a civil trial.

The trial stems from columnist E. Jean Carroll’s claims that the Republican raped her in late 1995 or early 1996 within the dressing room of a luxurious Manhattan division retailer. She is in search of unspecified damages.

Trump has stated the encounter by no means occurred and Carroll was making an attempt to stoke gross sales of a 2019 memoir when she first publicly claimed that the 2 of them ended up in a dressing room after an opportunity encounter and a playful interlude.

Kaplan warned Trump’s legal professionals to make no references to “Mr. Trump’s alleged desire to testify or to the burdens that any absence on his part allegedly might spare, or might have spared, the Court or the City of New York.”

Trump legal professional Joe Tacopina requested Kaplan on Wednesday to instruct the jury on the trial that Trump’s absence was supposed to spare New York City and the court docket system from the logistical burdens his presence would entail.

On Thursday, Tacopina responded to a deadline set by the decide to let him know whether or not Trump would attend the trial by saying it was too early to say, since that’s a call Trump will make through the trial.

In his order, the decide famous that Trump introduced earlier this week that he’ll communicate at a marketing campaign occasion in New Hampshire on April 27, the third day of the scheduled trial.

“If the Secret Service can protect him at that event, certainly the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the City of New York can see to his security in this very secure federal courthouse,” Kaplan wrote.

On Wednesday, Carroll legal professional Roberta Kaplan in a letter to the decide mocked Trump’s proposed jury instruction, saying Trump manages to make it to wrestling championships, political conventions, civil depositions and marketing campaign capabilities.

If so, she wrote, “then surely he could surmount the logistics of attending his own federal trial.”

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