Courtesy of Kaplan Hecker & Fink; Davidoff Studios/Getty Images
- Trump mistook a woman who is suing him for sexual assault for his ex-wife during a deposition.
- He has repeatedly said he couldn’t have raped E. Jean Carroll because she isn’t his “type.”
- When confronted with the photo during the deposition, Trump said, “That’s Marla, yeah.”
Donald Trump appeared to think a photo of E. Jean Carroll — the columnist who has accused the former president of rape and is suing him for defamation — was a picture of his ex-wife Marla Maples.
Trump mixed up the two women when shown a photograph from 1987 during a deposition last year, a new transcript shows.
Trump’s case of mistaken identity occurred even though he has repeatedly suggested that he couldn’t have assaulted Carroll because she is not his “type.” Trump and Maples were married from 1993 to 1999.
“That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” Trump said when shown a photo of Carroll by her lawyer Roberta Kaplan during an October 2022 deposition at Mar-a-Lago, according to newly-unsealed excerpts of the conversation obtained by Insider.
Insider contacted Carroll’s lawyers, and her team sent over the photo used in the deposition.
When Trump made the mix-up, his lawyer, Alina Habba, appeared to correct him and point out that the woman was Carroll. “Oh, I see,” Trump said in response to Habba’s correction.
Trump in his deposition repeatedly doubled down on his stance that he would never have found Carroll attractive.
“When I say she’s not my type, I say she is not a woman I would ever be attracted to,” Trump said in the deposition. “I just — it’s not even meant to be an insult. Now, some people would be attracted to her perhaps.· I would never be attracted to her.”
Carroll is currently suing Trump for defamation and, in a separate case, sexual assault, stemming from an alleged incident in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s, in which she accused the former president of raping her.
Attorneys for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
