MANHATTAN (CN) — The Justice Department said Tuesday that it will not seek to stand in as a defendant in writer E. Jean Carroll’s pending $10 million defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump, reversing the previous administration’s efforts and putting to rest years of unprecedented litigation over whether and when the president is eligible to use a government proxy.
If the Biden administration had not reversed course, and a federal judge granted the motion, it would have meant the end of the lawsuit since the federal government has sovereign immunity from defamation claims.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, says Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in a fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman department store. She sued Trump for defamation in 2019 while he was still president, based on his insult-ridden denial of her account.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type,” Trump said on June 24, 2019. “Number two, it never happened. It never happened.”
After New York enacted a “lookback” law giving survivors of abuse a one-year window to file time-barred claims, Carroll filed a second lawsuit claiming battery and additional counts of defamation. That case went to trial and in May a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll $5 million, finding she had proved that Trump sexually abused and defamed her.
In the meantime, Carroll’s first lawsuit has been tied up in legal proceedings, largely surrounding the Justice Department’s highly unusual September 2020 motion to stand in Trump’s place, permitted under the 1988 Westfall Act.
The bid under then-Attorney General William Barr kicked off a lengthy dispute over whether the act, often used in cases like car collisions involving U.S. Postal Service workers, applies to the office of president, and whether Trump sas acting in that role when he denied assaulting Carroll.
Ultimately the Second Circuit determined that the act can apply to the person seated in the Oval Office, but it left open the question of whether Trump was on the job when he made the comments. Following clarifications from a Washington appellate court and before Tuesday’s course reversal, that matter had been pending before U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who also presided over the civil rape trial earlier this year.
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton penned the letter confirming the Justice Department changed direction. The department considered the trial verdict, the videotaped deposition in which Trump doubled down on his comments about Carroll and defends his words in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, and new allegations in Carroll’s $10 million amended complaint.
“The department has determined that there is no longer a sufficient basis to conclude that the former president was motivated by ‘more than an insignificant’ desire to serve the United States government,” Boynton wrote in the 6-page letter. “Accordingly, the department hereby declines to issue a new Westfall Act certification.”
Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan said her team is grateful for the Justice Department’s reversal.
“We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will and spite, and not as president of the United States,” Kaplan said in a statement. “Now that one of the last obstacles has been removed, we look forward to trial in E. Jean Carroll’s original case in January 2024.”
Less than an hour before the government filed its letter, Kaplan asked the judge to dismiss Trump’s counterclaim against Carroll, which accuses her of defaming the former president since a jury found him liable for sexual abuse but not rape.
“Trump’s ‘tit for tat’ counterclaim is nothing more than his latest effort to spin his loss at trial,” Kaplan wrote in the court filing. She compared Trump’s defense to something found in a satirical publication.
“Trump alleges that Carroll defamed him and caused him ‘inordinate’ harm by implying in a post-trial interview that when he sexually assaulted her, he not only used his fingers, but also his penis,” Kaplan wrote.
“While that might read like an article penned by Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker or by a writer at the Onion, it’s actually the theory of the counterclaim that Trump now purports to assert in this action. But here in federal court, where logic and reason rather than satire prevail, it is clear that Trump’s new counterclaim for defamation should be dismissed with prejudice.”
A representative for Trump’s legal team did not immediately return a request for comment on both the Justice Department letter and Kaplan’s motion to dismiss.
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