NEW YORK (AP) – A New York, United States (US) writer who won a USD5 million jury verdict against ex-president Donald Trump can’t win a pending defamation lawsuit against him because the jury agreed with Trump that he never raped her, his lawyers told a judge on Monday.
The lawyers urged Judge Lewis A Kaplan to reject columnist E Jean Carroll’s bid to win USD10 million or more in a second judgement by rewriting the four-year-old lawsuit against Trump to conform with the findings of the jury that last month concluded Trump sexually abused Carroll but did not rape her.
The lawsuit was filed after Carroll said in a 2019 memoir for the first time publicly that Trump attacked her in the dressing room of a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
The lawsuit has been stalled because the US Justice Department wants to substitute the US for Trump as the defendant on the grounds that he was acting in his capacity as a president when he spoke on the issue in response to questions by reporters in 2019.
After the civil jury concluded Trump had sexually abused and defamed Carroll with comments last fall and awarded USD5 million in damages, lawyers for Carroll, 79, asked Kaplan to amend the original defamation lawsuit to seek USD10 million in compensatory damages and “very substantial” punitive damages.
They also sought to add defamation claims to the original lawsuit, citing comments Trump, 76, made at a CNN town hall shortly after the jury verdict. Trump’s lawyers wrote that the jury verdict favours Trump’s position in the pending lawsuit that he never defamed Carroll by claiming that he never raped her because the jury rejected the rape claim 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 assertion that the pending defamation case could go straight to the penalty phase of a trial because a jury had already concluded that Trump sexually abused Carroll.
