Author E. Jean Carroll has filed a lawsuit in the US state of New York against Donald Trump for allegedly raping her in the 1990s.
Ms. Carroll, 78, is one of the first parties to bring a claim under the Adult Survivors Act, which became effective on Thursday.
She is a well-known journalist, novelist, and advice columnist in the United States. Her "Ask E. Jean" column appeared in Elle magazine from 1993 until 2019, becoming to become one of the most enduring pieces of advise in an American publication.
Carroll, the first female contributing editor for Playboy, was praised for her first-person, zany journalism; The New York Times called her "feminism's Hunter S. Thompson."
In “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” her book from 2019, Carroll charged Les Moonves and Donald Trump with sexual assault in the middle of the 1990s. Trump and Moonves both refuted the accusations.
In New York, victims of sexual assault have a year under state law to pursue claims for crimes for which the statute of limitations would have already expired.
The allegations made against the former leader have been debunked.
According to Ms. Carroll, the incident took place in a high-end department store's changing room in New York 27 years ago.
If the sexual assault occurred when the victim was older than 18 and on a date that is passed the statute of limitations for the majority of offenses, the Adult Survivors Act allows victims to come forward.
It is based on the recently established child abuse law in the state, which covered minor abuse victims.
The Child Abuse Act offered victims of mistreatment a two-year opportunity to disclose their abuse after it became law in 2019. According to that law, churches, hospitals, schools, camps, and other organizations were the targets of more than 11,000 lawsuits in New York.
When Ms. Carroll initially made her charges public in 2019, she accused former President Trump of defamation. The claims made by Ms. Carroll were labeled "fiction" by Mr. Trump. A civil trial in the case has been scheduled for February 6.
According to a statement from Ms. Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, the latest complaint, which was submitted on Thursday, seeks to hold Mr. Trump accountable for the alleged attack.
Alina Habba, Mr. Trump's attorney, told US media that "this case is tragically an exploitation of the intent of this Act" and "runs the risk of delegitimizing the credibility of actual victims," despite the fact that she respects and admires those who have come forward.
The new law has caused more people to desire to file lawsuits.
Among these is a proposed class action lawsuit against Robert Hadden, a former gynecologist who worked at facilities connected to Columbia University and New York-Presbyterian and has been accused of sexually abusing many patients.
Although Mr. Hadden was convicted of sexual assaults in state court in 2016, he has pleaded innocent to federal charges of patient sexual abuse dating back more than 20 years.
Advocates for victims of sexual abuse claim that the law now allows those who may have previously been reluctant to speak up due to trauma or concern about punishment to do so.
Several other states, including New Jersey, California, Arizona, and Montana, either extended or temporarily eliminated their statutes of limitations on sex offenses in the wake of the #MeToo movement in 2018.
