Global Courant
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York writer who won a $5 million jury verdict against ex-President Donald Trump can’t win a pending libel lawsuit against him because the jury agreed with Trump that he never raped her, his lawyers told a judge Monday.
The lawyers urged Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to reject columnist E. Jean Carroll’s bid to win $10 million or more in a second verdict by rewriting the 4-year-old suit against Trump to comply are with the jury’s findings that Trump last month sexually assaulted Carroll but did not rape her.
The lawsuit was filed after Carroll first publicly said in a 2019 memoir that Trump assaulted her in the mid-1990s in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan.
The lawsuit has been dropped as the US Justice Department seeks to replace the United States with Trump as the defendant, as he was acting in his capacity as president when he spoke on the matter in 2019 in response to reporters’ questions.
After the civil jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll with comments last fall and awarded $5 million in damages, the attorneys for Carroll, 79, asked Kaplan to amend the original defamation lawsuit to allow $10 million in damages and to demand “very substantial” punishment. injury.
They also tried to add defamation claims to the original lawsuit, citing remarks Trump, 76, made at a CNN town hall shortly after the jury’s verdict.
Trump’s attorneys wrote that the jury’s verdict favors Trump’s position in the pending trial that he never defamed Carroll by claiming he never raped her because the jury rejected the claim of rape at trial . Trump, who never attended the trial, is appealing the jury verdict.
Kaplan must decide whether to accept the rewrite of the original defamation claim and Carroll’s claim that the pending defamation case can go straight to the penalty stage of a trial because a jury had already concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll. He also has to decide whether the United States can be substituted as the defendant in place of Trump, which would effectively nullify the action.
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Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, said in a statement Monday in response to Trump’s lawyers’ filing that the jury verdict supports the claims in the pending trial.
“A unanimous jury found that Donald Trump put his fingers in E. Jean Carroll’s vagina against her will and then defamed her when he said he didn’t know who E. Jean Carroll was, that he had never met her at Bergdorf Goodman, and that she made up the whole story as part of a ‘scam’ or ‘hoax,'” Kaplan said.
“Contrary to Donald Trump’s final arguments, the jury’s verdict makes perfect sense — because the jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump had sexually assaulted her, it concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when he later claimed otherwise,” she added.
