A video in which former US president Donald Trump was recorded speaking disparagingly about women can be shown to jurors deciding what he owes a columnist he defamed, a judge has ruled.
US district judge Lewis A Kaplan ruled the 2005 Access Hollywood video can be shown in the trial, which is due to start on Tuesday.
In May, a jury awarded columnist E Jean Carroll $5 million after concluding she was sexually abused by the former president in 1996 and that he defamed her in 2022 with public denials and insistence she was lying.
The judge ruled the tape, in which Mr Trump was heard bragging about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women who were not his wife, could provide a useful insight into his state of mind.
“The jury could find that Mr Trump was prepared to admit privately to sexual assaults eerily similar to that alleged by Ms Carroll,” the judge said.
The judge also ruled Mr Trump’s lawyers cannot introduce evidence or argument “suggesting or implying” that the former president did not sexually assault Mr Carroll, that she fabricated her account of the assault or that she had financial and political motivations to do so.
Lawyers for Mr Trump have not commented on the ruling.
When the video surfaced during the 2016 US presidential election, Mr Trump dismissed it as “locker room banter” and “a private conversation”.
Mr Trump is embroiled in another civil business fraud trial in New York surrounding claims his net worth was inflated by billions of dollars on financial statements that helped him secure business loans and insurance.
The former president plans to deliver his own closing argument in the trial, according to reports in the US.
Mr Trump attended a court hearing in Washington on Tuesday in a different case relating to federal charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, which has raised questions about whether presidents have immunity against prosecution.
“I feel that as a president, you have to have immunity, very simple,” Mr Trump said after attending the hearing. “It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box, and it’s a very, very sad thing that’s happened with this whole situation.”
He has long vowed to prosecute US president Joe Biden if a second Trump administration returns to the White House and also said former president Barack Obama and George W Bush could be prosecuted.
He said there “will be bedlam in the country” if the case against him continues.
Federal appeal court judges at the hearing expressed scepticism at Mr Trump’s argument that he was immune from prosecution.
Judge Karen Le Craft Henderson said: “I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law.”
