E. Jean Carroll, with her hard-to-believe story about being assaulted or raped (her accounts vary) in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room by one Donald Trump a quarter-century ago, isn't going away quietly.

She's gotten her attorneys to send a demand to Trump to hand over a DNA sample so she can check if it's his male DNA that's still on the dress she claims to have worn, according to lab tests.

According to the Washington Post:

E. Jean Carroll, a New York–based writer who last summer accused President Trump of raping her in the 1990s, requested Thursday that he submit a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on the black coat dress she said she was wearing during the alleged assault. Carroll's lawyers served notice to a Trump attorney on Thursday, asking that Trump provide a sample for "analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress," the Associated Press first reported. Carroll's lawyers requested that Trump provide the DNA sample on March 2 in Washington.

Here's the Axios account, which has more details:

Writer E. Jean Carroll, who claims President Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, has requested a DNA sample from the president as evidence of her allegations, AP reports. The big picture: Carroll went public with the allegations last June. She claims Trump pinned her against the wall of a dressing room in either 1995 or 1996 and forced himself on her, but that she fought back and quickly escaped. Carroll's lawyer claims that the dress Carroll wore that day, which she says has hung in her closet unlaundered since, has been DNA tested and shows four samples present. At least one of the samples has been identified as male.

I used to shop at Bergdorf's at about the time she in the mid- to late 1990s, and I found her account hazy and contradictory. As she described what Bergdorf's was like at the time, certain details didn't add up. She conflated the store layout with Macy's at the time, with its lingerie department next to its evening gowns, when, in fact, Bergdorf's had only a very tiny, insignificant lingerie section next to its menswear. She said the dressing room doors were inexplicably all open, like Macy's, or one of them was open (her story shifted) instead of customarily locked, and Trump forced himself onto her in one of them. She mischaracterized Trump as being confident and powerful at the time, around 1996, when, in fact, his business fortunes were on the outs. She said she was attractive, but she wasn't Trump's known kind of attractive, and the flirtatious behavior she described from him didn't match that of women I knew Trump flirted with around that time. She didn't even have her fashion dates quite right on the shoes she claimed to have worn. Her account seemed to be a mix of truth and fiction or misremembered details. I wrote about those off-kilter details here.

She was selling a book, and although the Trump story would have been her "A" material, she listed it as almost an aside near the bottom, behind other #MeToo stories of encounters with the likes of Les Moonves, who really was a sex harasser. Why wouldn't that go at the top of her story?

She lost further credibility when she made a television appearance on Anderson Cooper's CNN program, focusing on President Trump's denial that he knew her, and not confirming Cooper's assertion that they knew each other. She made it clear that what she really wanted was an affirmation that she was indeed attractive at one time, a pretty desperate thing, not the thing you want to be talking about if your purpose is to accuse someone of a crime, something that raises questions about whether something consensual went on, which Cooper did not pursue. At the end, she declared rape "sexy," something CNN figured it had to cut her off on, given the credibility blow. I wrote about that here.

Now she's back, wanting to sue Trump and prove that yes, indeed, she has Trump's DNA on her dress. The Axios account notes that apparently she had the unwashed dress tested for DNA samples, and they found four of them. At least one was male.

I'm no expert on this, but if up to three of the found samples were female, then presumably, they wouldn't have been sexual in nature; they could have been someone brushing her on the arm, or doing an air kiss or whatever. Why would the male sample be at all different? If Trump were to, Heaven forbid, give a sample to her lawyers as they demand, how could such a thing prove a sexual encounter instead of a brush in the hallway at the nearby Plaza Hotel, which he might have owned at the time, or Trump Tower. How could the time of encounter be affirmed as being done at the Bergdorf's dressing room? How could it prove anything non-consensual? It doesn't seem to be information that could confirm anything more than some kind of contact, given that they walked in the same social circles, as Cooper pointed out with his photo?

What leaps out at me from this is how disorderly this whole thing seemed. She kept an unwashed dress for thirty years in her closet, never taking it to the dry cleaner's? She was a fashionista, a fashion magazine editor, if it was a favorite dress, she'd have it dry cleaned. She didn't dry clean her clothes? And thirty years piled on? What kind of closet did she really have?

It's probably not the biggest point, but it's indicative of something kind of disorderly going on, probably consistent with the rest of her shambling account. What kind of woman leaves a fancy black dress uncleaned in her closet for 30 years?

Probably someone trying to sell a book and trying to best Michael Avenatti in the 'bizarre attacks on Trump' sweepstakes.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.