MANHATTAN (CN) — Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday asked a federal judge for a new trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him, claiming the trial’s outcome was “infected” by the judge’s errors.
Following a trial in the Southern District of New York, a nine-person jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages, finding the former president mocked her after she accused him of raping her decades before.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, sought civil damages after then-President Trump’s June 2019 denials of her account that he raped her in a dressing room in the lingerie section of Bergdorf Goodman.
According to Trump, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan erroneously excluded the former president’s testimony from trial and provided flawed jury instructions on the definition of common-law malice.
Trump's attorneys argue that common-law malice “focuses on the speaker’s intention and requires the intention to be the sole, exclusive desire to harm," and that Kaplan's refusal to allow Trump to testify on his state of mind when he denied Carroll’s statements was prejudicial because it prevented him from explaining his intentions.
“President Trump’s testimony about his own state of mind is the most relevant and probative evidence on the issue of common-law malice, and he was uniquely positioned to address it,” Trump said in his motion.
Trump added that his public statements denying Carroll’s allegations were defensive, because he was a high-profile figure responding to a “highly visible" accusation.
“Any public figure in such a situation has compelling motivations to deny the allegation for many reasons other than the desire to harm the plaintiff,” Trump said in his motion. “By erroneously foreclosing any such testimony … the court all but assured that the jury would make a baseless punitive-damages award.”
Trump also claims the jury was misled by “erroneous and prejudicial" instructions. Kaplan told jurors they can find that a statement is made maliciously “if it is made with a deliberate intent to injure or made out of hatred, ill will or spite, or made with willful, wanton, or reckless disregard of another’s rights.”
But, Trump claims, the instructions should have specified a showing that intent of injury was the sole motivation for denying Carroll’s account of the assault.
“By affirmatively instructing the jury that an intention to harm the plaintiff is not required to support a finding of common-law malice, the instruction plainly created an erroneous impression regarding the standard of liability,” Trump said in the motion.
Trump’s team says the $83.3 million in damages awarded to Carroll should be remitted, arguing the amount is excessive.
Trial in early 2024 focused on damages, sinnce Kaplan ruled in September 2023 that Trump had acted with actual malice when he made a series of false statements about Carroll in June 2019 after she publicly accused him of raping her decades earlier. She first came forward with the accusations in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal” and an excerpt published in New York Magazine.
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