Former President Donald Trump is being sued for defamation by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll over his denial of her allegation that he raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and once again, some in the liberal media have prejudged the outcome and declared Trump to be guilty as charged.

In fact, left-leaning Slate magazine pointed to a pre-trial evidentiary ruling in the case that it claims is the "smoking gun" that will establish beyond any reasonable doubt that the former president is a serial sexual assaulter and, therefore, obviously guilty of the alleged rape of Carroll.

That so-called "smoking gun" that ostensibly proves Trump's guilt is none other than the 2005 Access Hollywood tape released in 2016 in which Trump bragged about what some women will let celebrities do, as well as unproven allegations of sexual assault from two other women, plus the pattern of Trump's routine denials and counterclaims against his accusers.

Carroll's 2019 allegation of a mid-90s rape

Fox News reported in 2019 that Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, first raised the accusation that then-President Trump had raped her as part of a new book she was set to release at that time that also leveled similar allegations against several other men.

With regard to Trump, Carroll claimed that they were shopping together in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995 or 1996 when Trump suddenly pushed her into a dressing room and forced himself upon her sexually, though she was ultimately able to escape following a brief "colossal struggle."

Trump, of course, flatly denied the allegation, accused Carroll of lying, and, in his bluntly crude way, asserted that she was not the sort of woman that he would have even been sexually attracted to in the first place.

The Access Hollywood tape and testimony from two other accusers allowed as evidence

Carroll responded to Trump's denial with a defamation lawsuit and, fast-forward several years, that suit has now gone to trial in a New York courtroom, per CNN, where she is now attempting to prove that Trump defamed her with his denial by convincing a jury that he actually did rape her nearly three decades ago.

During that trial, according to Slate, Carroll's legal team will be allowed to use the Access Hollywood tape and accusations of two other women to try to establish in the minds of jurors that Trump has exhibited a "propensity" for sexual assault.

That stems from a 23-page pre-trial ruling issued in March by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to allow Carroll to present the tape and testimony from the two other women as possible evidence to establish a pattern of certain behavior.

That tape recording of a 2005 conversation between Trump and others, which had been leaked less than a month prior to the 2016 election, featured Trump crudely discussing what certain star-struck women would allow certain celebrity men, presumably including himself, to do to them, including kissing and groping without first seeking consent.

As for the testimony of the two women, the first is named Jessica Leeds, who has claimed that Trump groped her during an airplane flight in 1979, while the second is a reporter named Natasha Stoynoff, who has similarly accused Trump of kissing and groping her in 2005 while she interviewed him at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Typically, such supposed evidence of an alleged propensity for certain behaviors is disallowed by Federal Rules of Evidence, but there is an exception in cases involving allegations of sexual assault -- thus, the judge ruled that the tape and testimonies could be submitted as evidence by Carroll and it would be left up to the jury to decide if there was a pattern of behavior or not.

Video clips of Trump's denials of sexual assault allegations

Carroll also sought to have entered as evidence of Trump's propensity for sexual assault a series of video clips of him denying the numerous sexual assault allegations that have been posed against him, as they, too, tend to exhibit a certain pattern that matched with what he did in response to her accusation -- a flat denial of the allegation, a counteraccusation that the woman was lying, and a clear implication that the accuser was not the type of woman that he would be attracted to.

The judge, however, ultimately deferred until trial on rendering a decision about whether to allow those video clips to be used as evidence against him.