The lawyer representing E Jean Carroll on Wednesday welcomed a ruling allowing the writer to include in an ongoing defamation lawsuit disparaging comments Donald Trump made about her after she won her sexual abuse case against him.
Roberta Kaplan, the attorney for Carroll, also noted on Tuesday night that she and her client looked forward to “moving ahead expeditiously” with the remaining claims after a federal judge ruled Carroll could pursue her $10m defamation case against the former US president that was filed following the publication of her 2019 book in which she accused Trump of rape and his claim she was lying.
This lawsuit is related to but separate from the case in New York in which Carroll won a $5m civil judgment against Trump last month – $2m for battery and $3m for defamation – when a jury found him liable for sexual abuse after he assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Jurors in that case decided it had not been proved Trump had also raped her, as Carroll had alleged in the suit filed last November as well as in the 2019 suit that is ongoing.
Trump had argued in recent weeks that the ongoing defamation case must be dismissed because the jury in New York had concluded he never raped her.
Roberta Kaplan said she will ask a jury to consider Trump’s comments during a town hall-style interview that CNN coincidentally broadcast the day after the jury decision last month, in which he appeared to double down on his claims that he did not know Carroll, 79; described her as a “whack job”; and said “I have no idea who this woman – this is a fake story, made-up story.”
Carroll’s first defamation lawsuit was filed over comments Trump made about her in 2019, when he was president, after she had first publicly accused him of a decades-old sexual assault. In an Oval Office interview with the Hill, Trump had said that Carroll was “totally lying”: “I know nothing about her.
“She is – it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that,” he added. He had also said before the jury trial that he could not have assaulted Carroll because she was not “his type”.
On Wednesday, Roberta Kaplan told the Guardian: “One factor juries are asked to look at is whether the damages are appropriate in order to deter the defendant from engaging in future conduct.” She added: “This is not a new claim based on the CNN town hall, but a claim for punitive damages based on the 2019 comments. We’re looking forward to litigating this matter in the courts.”
Meanwhile Judge Lewis Kaplan has asked the US justice department to present arguments next month on whether it still believes Trump was acting within the scope of his employment as president when he made the comments and could not be held personally liable.
Carroll’s defamation lawsuit was originally filed in 2020 after she wrote in a 2019 book that Trump raped her in the store after he turned a friendly and flirtatious chance meeting revolving around lingerie shopping into a violent encounter.
Trump, she claimed, disparaged her, damaging her career and reputation. Trump denied that he had attacked her and said the allegations were a hoax.
Jurors in last month’s trial agreed that Carroll had failed to prove Trump raped her but agreed on preponderance of evidence that she had been sexually abused and that he had defamed her by making false statements about her in a deposition and in public comments.
Trump’s attorneys later filed arguments that Carroll’s $5m damages award should be knocked down to less than $1m or Kaplan should grant a new trial on damages because the jury had proved that Trump was not lying when he denied raping her.
Attorneys for the former president rejected Carroll’s claim for increased damages. “We maintain that she should not be permitted to retroactively change her legal theory, at the 11th hour, to avoid the consequences of an adverse finding against her,” Trump lawyer Alina Habba said in a statement to the Guardian.
