Judge dismisses Trump defamation case against writer who won sex abuse lawsuit
8 August 2023, 06:44
A judge ruled that the former president cannot claim that E Jean Carroll defamed him.
A federal judge has dismissed former President Donald Trump’s countersuit against a writer who won a sexual abuse lawsuit against him, ruling that Mr Trump cannot claim she defamed him by continuing to say she was not only sexually abused but raped.
The ruling shuts down Mr Trump’s effort to turn the legal tables on E Jean Carroll, who won a five-million-dollar (£3.9 million) judgment against him in May and is pursuing her own defamation suit.
Mr Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said that his lawyers would appeal “the flawed decision” to dismiss his counterclaim.
Ms Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, said she was pleased with the ruling and looking ahead to a trial scheduled for January in her defamation suit, which concerns a series of remarks that Mr Trump has made in denying her sexual assault allegation.
Mr Kaplan said: “E Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages” in that trial.
Ms Carroll accused Mr Trump of trapping her in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996, forcibly kissing her, yanking down her tights and raping her as she tried to fight him off.
Mr Trump denies that any of it happened.
He has called Ms Carroll a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell a memoir.
In this spring’s trial, a civil court jury concluded that Mr Trump sexually abused Ms Carroll but rejected her claim that he raped her.
Legally, the difference depended on specifics of how, in the jury’s view, he penetrated her against her will.
When a CNN interviewer asked her what was going through her mind when she heard the rape finding, Ms Carroll responded, “Well, I just immediately say in my own head, ‘Oh, yes, he did. Oh, yes, he did’.”
She also said she had told one of Mr Trump’s attorneys that “he did it, and you know it”.
Mr Trump then sued Ms Carroll, saying her statements were defamatory, seeking retraction and money.
“These false statements were clearly contrary to the jury verdict,” the attorneys argued in court papers, saying the panel had found that rape “clearly was not committed”.
Jurors in the case were told that under the applicable New York law, rape requires forcible penetration by a penis, whereas sexual abuse would cover forcible penetration by a finger.
Ms Carroll alleged that both happened.
Her lawyers said that her post-verdict statements were “substantially true”.
The judge did also.
In the ruling, Judge Lewis A Kaplan wrote: “The difference between Ms Carroll’s allegedly defamatory statements — that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as defined in the New York Penal Law — and the ‘truth’ — that Mr Trump forcibly digitally penetrated Ms Carroll — are minimal.
“Both are felonious sex crimes.”
“Indeed, both acts constitute ‘rape’” as the term is used in everyday language, in some laws and in other contexts, added Kaplan, who is no relation to Ms Carroll’s lawyer.
