Former US President Donald Trump’s attempt to countersue a woman who won a sexual abuse lawsuit against him has been thrown out by a judge.
The ruling puts a stop to Mr Trump’s claim that E.Jean Carroll defamed him when she said he not only sexually abused her but also raped her.
Ms Carroll won a $5 million (£3.9 million) judgment against him in May and is pursuing her own defamation suit against him.
Trump attorney Alina Habba said his lawyers would appeal “the flawed decision” to dismiss his counterclaim.
Ms Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, said she was pleased with the ruling and looking ahead to a trial scheduled in January in her defamation suit, sparked by remarks Trump made denying her sexual assault allegation.
“E. Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages” in that trial, Kaplan said.
The writer accused MrTrump of trapping her in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996, forcibly kissing her and raping her as she tried to fight him off.
He denies it happened and has called her, among other things, a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell a memoir.
In this spring’s trial, a civil court jury concluded Mr Trump sexually abused her but rejected her claim he raped her.
When a CNN interviewer asked her what was going through her mind when she heard the rape finding, the writer responded, “Well, I just immediately say in my own head, ‘Oh, yes, he did. Oh, yes, he did.”’
She also said she told one of Mr Trump’s attorneys that “he did it, and you know it.”
Mr Trump then sued Ms Carroll, saying her statements were defamatory and sought a retraction and money.
“These false statements were clearly contrary to the jury verdict,” the attorneys argued in court papers, saying the panel had found rape “clearly was not committed.”
“The difference between Ms. Carroll’s allegedly defamatory statements — that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as defined in the New York Penal Law — and the ‘truth’ — that Mr. Trump forcibly digitally penetrated Ms. Carroll — are minimal,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in Monday’s ruling.
“Both are felonious sex crimes.”
“Indeed, both acts constitute ‘rape”’ as the term is used in everyday language, in some laws and in other contexts, added Mr Kaplan, who is not related to Ms Carroll’s lawyer.
