Donald Trump Must Face the Music

• A federal judge denied Donald Trump's request to delay his defamation trial with former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.
• The former president's trial will begin on April 25.
• Trump's lawyers argued that a fair and impartial jury could not be selected because of media coverage surrounding the indictment.
• The judge ruled that Trump partially fueled media coverage with his hush money payments indictment and therefore refused to postpone the trial.

A federal judge has denied former president Donald Trump's attempts to delay his defamation trial with former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Trump, who was recently charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree for allegedly making hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, has juggled myriad legal woes and will soon add the defamation trial to his list.

Caroll is suing the former president over allegations that he defamed her character when he denied sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York City in the mid-1990s, including insulting her appearance. The trial will begin on April 25 despite the Trump legal team's best efforts to postpone it.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin tweeted on Monday morning that Trump's legal team argued that selecting a fair and impartial jury for the Carroll defamation suit wouldn't be possible given his indictment—and the ensuing media coverage—occurring in the same state. However, federal judge Lew Kaplan ruled that Trump had partially fueled the media coverage with his own actions and therefore did not grant the former president the delay he wanted.

"There is no justification for an adjournment. This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution," Kaplan wrote in his opinion statement, Rubin tweeted. "The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment – coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump's own actions – would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation."

Rubin tweeted that Kaplan also added a footnote explaining that as Trump is subject to several criminal and civil investigations, developments in any of the investigations could result in further publicity, and the "absence of any such developments in the period immediately preceding jury selection is not realistic" for the Carroll trial.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he didn't know Carroll, stating that she's "not my type" and that he believed she made up the allegations to sell more copies of her memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, published in 2019.

Carroll first filed a defamation suit against Trump in 2019 for the statements he made about her regarding her book sales, but that trial has been indefinitely delayed. The trial set to begin April 25 is a second defamation suit filed by Carroll in 2022.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's campaign for comment by email.