By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government request to drop Donald Trump as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a writer who said the president falsely denied raping her in a Manhattan department store a quarter century ago.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan refused to let the government substitute itself for Trump as a defendant in former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit.

Kaplan’s decision is a defeat for Trump, because dropping him as a defendant would have shielded him from liability and likely doomed Carroll’s defamation claim.