MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal judge on Monday put an end to the defamation counterclaim brought by Donald Trump against E. Jean Carroll, seeking redress from the writer who proved to a New York jury that Trump was liable for sexually abusing her.
Carroll says that, decades ago, Trump raped her in a fitting room at the famed Bergdorf Goodman department store, first detailing the attack in her 2019 book and an excerpt published in New York Magazine ahead of publication.
Trump’s denial of the accusation teed up Carroll’s defamation claims against Trump. In May, Carroll won a $5 million jury verdict after proving battery and defamation claims at a weeklong trial in the Southern District of New York.
On the stand, as she did in her book, Carroll, a longtime advice columnist at Elle magazine, described a friendly shopping encounter that turned monstrous when Carroll and Trump made their way toward the fitting room: Trump shut the door and pushed her against the wall. Then he shoved first his fingers, then his penis, inside of her.
Legally, the two acts of sexual violence are distinct — and jurors ultimately checked the box on sexual abuse, but not rape, for the battery count.
Trump sought to exploit that discrepancy when bringing a defamation complaint of his own, citing Carroll’s book excerpt, social media posts and television interviews, accusing her of “an intent to significantly and spitefully harm and attack [Trump’s] reputation, as these false statements were clearly contrary to the jury verdict.”
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan shut down that argument in Monday’s ruling.
“Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, albeit digitally rather than with his penis,” Kaplan wrote in the 24-page ruling. “Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations.”
Referred to in italics as Carroll II in Monday’s order, the lawsuit Carroll won in May is the second she filed against Trump, with the ordinarily time-barred battery claim made possible by a New York law enacted in November 2022 giving survivors a one-year window to file old claims against their abusers.
That law, the Adult Survivors Act, borrows wording from New York criminal law in its definitions of rape, sexual abuse and forcible touching. The jury needed to find only one of the three elements to come down in Carroll’s favor.
“The issues of whether he ‘raped’ or ‘forcibly touched’ her were entirely extraneous given the sexual abuse finding,” Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, the verdict form could have omitted the rape question entirely, and the judgment in Carroll II would have been unaffected.”
To sway Kaplan, Trump would have had to prove Carroll’s statements that he raped her were false. Instead, the judge found the opposite.
“[B]ased on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr. Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms. Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally — in other words, that Mr. Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law,” Kaplan wrote.
Judge Kaplan had already skewered Trump’s attempt to seize on the legal definition of rape when in July he denied Trump’s bid for a new trial.
In that earlier ruling, the judge similarly found Trump ignored trial evidence and misrepresented the verdict, arguing he'd been cleared of rape when "the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump’s attorneys of the firm Habba Madaio & Associates LLP are planning to appeal.
“We strongly disagree with the flawed decision and will be filing an appeal shortly,” attorney Alina Habba said Monday through a representative.
Still pending is Carroll’s initial defamation suit, Carroll I, asking for an additional $10 million in damages, which is set to go to trial in January 2024.
Carroll’s attorneys at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP have their sights set on that proceeding.
"We are pleased that the court dismissed Donald Trump's counterclaim. That means that the January 15th jury trial will be limited to a narrow set of issues and shouldn't take very long to complete,” attorney Roberta Kaplan said in an emailed statement.
“E. Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages based on the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made in 2019."
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