Global Courant 2023-05-23 03:57:27
E. Jean Carroll, the columnist who won a $5 million sexual assault and libel award against former President Donald Trump, is seeking at least $10 million more in a new lawsuit filed Monday that would hold him liable for comments he made. after the verdict.
An amended lawsuit seeking $10 million in punitive damages — and more in punitive damages — was filed in Manhattan federal court by attorneys for Carroll, who says Trump’s comments after she made rape allegations against him damaged her reputation so much. ruined her old job as an Elle magazine advice columnist.
The lawyers said in the rewritten lawsuit that the former US president “doubled down” on derogatory comments about Carroll during a CNN appearance a day after the verdict.
“Trump’s post-verdict defamatory statements demonstrate the depth of his malice toward Carroll, as it is difficult to imagine defamatory conduct that may have been motivated more by hatred, ill-will or spite,” the lawyers wrote. “This conduct supports very substantial damages in Carroll’s favor, both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same.”
A nine-member jury decided two weeks ago that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll in an upscale Manhattan department store in the early spring of 1996.
LOOK | Donald Trump’s comments on CNN’s CNN City Hall sexual assault verdict:
Trump overturns CNN city hall sexual assault verdict
After years of calling CNN “fake news,” Donald Trump held a campaign town hall on the network. It came just days after a jury found that Trump, the current front-runner in the Republican primary race, sexually assaulted and defamed columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll, who testified at the trial, first revealed her claims that Trump raped her in a locker room in a 2019 book, but the jury rejected that claim.
Joe Tacopina, a Trump attorney, declined to comment on the new claims.
The lawyers filed the new claims to amend a defamation lawsuit that had been suspended as an appeals court ruled whether Trump could be held liable for comments he made in 2019 while he was president. The US Department of Justice supports its lawyers’ claims that the United States should be replaced as the defendant.
In the new claim, Carroll’s lawyers said Trump, “undeterred by the jury’s verdict, persisted in maliciously defaming Carroll again” the following day at a town hall event hosted by CNN.
“Repeating his previous defamatory statements, he claimed to an audience eager to applaud him that ‘I never met this woman. I never saw this woman’, that he did not sexually assault Carroll and that her account – that was validated just the day before by a jury of Trump’s peers — was a “phony,” “fabricated story” concocted by a “crazy man.” Those statements led to enthusiastic cheers and applause from the audience on live TV,” the lawyers wrote.
