Donald Trump’s October 2022 deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case was notable for something he said about his second wife, Marla Maples.
Trump infamously mistook Carroll for Maples in a photo he was shown, despite having suggested that because Carroll was “not my type” he would have had no romantic interest in her. Carroll has accused him of a decades-old rape.
Carroll, who brought the lawsuit in November, alleges that Trump defamed her in a 2022 Truth Social post by calling her allegations “a Hoax and a lie” and saying “This woman is not my type!” when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
The former Elle magazine columnist had added a charge of battery under a recently adopted New York law that allows adult survivors of sexual abuse to sue their alleged attacker regardless of the statute of limitations. Trump has denied all allegations that he raped Carroll or defamed her.
It has been noted that Trump’s fuzziness about that Maples era of his life apparently extended to elsewhere in the deposition, a transcript and video of which was released Friday.
At one point, Carroll’s attorney asked Trump a basic factual question: “Isn’t it true that you were seeing Ms. Maples before you were divorced from Ivana Trump?”
Trump responded, amazingly, “I don’t know,” in the sworn deposition. “It was towards the end of the marriage. So I don’t know, really. It could be a lapover, but I don’t really know.”
(It is not clear what a “lapover” means, but we’re guessing it refers to overlap.)
Trump was also asked more generally if he had been seeing women outside of his first marriage, and he responded, “I don’t know.”
So the man who engaged in one of the most famous and widely reported-upon affairs in American history apparently isn’t sure whether the timeline qualifies it as an extramarital affair.
Trump’s divorce from Ivana was finalized in December 1990. And both before and in the years after, it became clear his relationship with Marla Maples had been more than a rumor.
