A New York writer who won a $5 million jury verdict against Donald Trump cannot win a pending defamation suit against him because the jury concurred with the ex-President that he never raped her, Trump's attorneys argued Monday.
The attorneys urged Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to deny columnist E. Jean Carroll's proposal to win $10 million or more in a second judgment by revising the four-year-old lawsuit against Trump to reflect the jury's conclusion last month that Trump sexually abused Carroll but did not rape her.
Trump's Lawyers Say Defamation Claim by Writer Must Fail
According to ABC News, the lawsuit was filed after Carroll revealed for the first time in a 2019 memoir that Trump assaulted her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
The lawsuit has been halted due to the US Justice Department's desire to substitute the United States for Trump as the defendant on the grounds that he was acting in his capacity as president when he responded to reporters' queries about the issue in 2019.
The attorneys for Carroll, 79, asked Kaplan to amend the original defamation lawsuit to seek $10 million in compensatory damages and "very substantial" punitive damages after a civil jury determined Trump had sexually abused and defamed Carroll with comments last fall and awarded $5 million in damages.
In addition, they sought to add defamation claims to the original lawsuit, citing remarks Trump, age 76, made during a CNN town hall shortly after the jury verdict.
Because the jury rejected the rape claim at trial, Trump's attorneys wrote that the jury verdict supports Trump's position in the pending lawsuit that he never defamed Carroll by asserting that he never violated her.
Trump, who did not attend the trial, is disputing the verdict of the jury. Kaplan must decide whether to accept the rewritten version of the original defamation claim and Carroll's argument that the pending defamation case could proceed directly to the penalty phase because a jury has already determined that Trump sexually abused Carroll.
E. Jean Carroll's Attorney Blasts Trump's Argument
Per NY Times, he must also determine whether the United States can be substituted for Trump as the defendant, effectively nullifying the action. Trump stated in 2019 that Carroll's accusation was "completely false" and that he could not have assaulted her because she was not his "type." This 2019 defamation lawsuit is still pending due to pending appeals.
Roberta A. Kaplan, the primary attorney for Carroll, stated in a Monday evening statement that nothing about the verdict in the recent trial was inconsistent with Carroll's longstanding claim, SFGate reported.
The recent trial arose from a lawsuit Carroll filed against Trump in November 2016 under a new state law in New York that gives adult victims of sexual abuse a one-year window to prosecute alleged abusers for battery, even if the statute of limitations had long since expired.
Related Article : Biden Criminal Bribery: FBI To Bring Doc to Capitol Hill, Accuser Is 'Highly Credible' Source
