Trump seeks to drop E. Jean Carroll’s second lawsuit

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Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to block a long-stalled defamation lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll by using her successful $5 million verdict in another case she won against the former president .

The Manhattan federal court filing argues that Trump cannot discredit Carroll by dismissing his rape accusation in the pending case because he was found liable by a jury in another case for sexually abusing her, but not rape.

The operative question in this case is, and always has been, whether a rape occurred in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room,” the filing says, and the jury “found that one did not.

Carroll said Trump raped her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. She filed a battery and defamation lawsuit over the alleged rape and Trump’s post-presidency comments calling her a “con job” last year.

After a trial that featured live testimony from Carroll and videotaped deposition testimony from Trump, a jury last month awarded Carroll $2 million for the battery claim and $3 million for his claim on Defamation.

The battery claim includes various elements, including one for rape and one for sexual abuse. Its verdict sheet asked whether Carroll, 79, had proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll, the nine-person jury checked the box that said no. Asked if Carroll had proven that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll, the jury checked the box that said yes.

Jurors did not speak to reporters after the verdict to explain their decision. Carroll testified that he was attacked from behind and did not see how Trump entered him.

The case that went to trial was Carroll’s second case against Trump.

The first alleged then-President Trump disparaged Carroll by calling his claims a “hoax” and “con job” when he went public in 2019.

That case, now identified in court papers as Carroll I, is stuck in a federal appeals court in Washington, DC otherwise Trump would not be liable because he was president at the time of the comments. The case was returned to U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, the same judge who presided over Carroll II in April.

In a filing last month, Carroll’s lawyers sought to amend the earlier lawsuit to add a new defamation claim after Trumptrashedheras a wack job at a CNN town hall after last month’s verdict.

The proposed amended suit also changed the mention of “rape” to sexual abuse or sexual assault. Trump’s filing states that the amended complaint removed 71 uses of the word rape.

Trump attorney Alina Habba said in a statement that Carroll is trying to “retrofit” his lawsuit “while blatantly ignoring the part that undermines the viability of his claim.”

“Confronted with the Carroll II jury’s rejection of her rape accusation, Ms. Carroll now looks to remove almost all references to the word ‘rape’ from her complaint and abandon the narrative she has conveyed to the public for many years. year,” Habba said.

Trump’s filing also urges the judge not to allow Carroll to add defamation claims stemming from a CNN town hall in which he called Carroll a “wack job” he’s never met.

The filing said that Trump “did not reject or reject the jury’s verdict” during the town hall “but simply expressed his disagreement with the finding and reiterated his position that he had insisted throughout of proceedings that the claimed event never happened.”

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, disputed Trump’s contention that the earlier conviction hurt his case.

“Contrary to Donald Trump’s latest arguments, the jury’s verdict makes perfect sense because the jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump sexually abused her, it concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when she later claimed otherwise,” Kaplan said.

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