The Daily Beast reports:

With the rape trial of former President Donald Trump just days away, his effort to prevent jurors from hearing about another incident—when Trump allegedly forced himself on a different journalist—fell flat Monday.

The federal judge overseeing the case ruled that Trump’s legal team made their appeal too late. And now jurors are poised to hear about a separate incident that could show a pattern of sexual assault from the former president.

It’s the latest sign that the rape case against Trump, years in the making, might not go his way—after he’s faced setback after setback.

Trump will be on trial this week in Manhattan for allegedly raping magazine journalist E. Jean Carroll inside a luxury department store’s changing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll was only able to expand her civil defamation lawsuit—essentially going after Trump because he claimed Carroll was lying—into a more severe battery lawsuit, after New York passed a state law in November 2022 allowing alleged sexual assault victims to file civil suits after the statute of limitations had expired. Carroll filed her expanded lawsuit just hours after the law took effect.

The incident Trump’s lawyers scrambled to suppress in court is a distinctly similar episode; years after the alleged Carroll rape, a People magazine journalist claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her, too. [Continue reading…]