MANHATTAN (CN) — Dishing Donald Trump a defeat on pretrial summary judgement, a New York judge ruled Wednesday that writer E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against the former president in January 2024 will be held only to determine how much Trump owes her in damages.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found Trump acted with actual malice in making a series of false statements about Carroll in June 2019 when she came forward with accusations that Trump raped her decades earlier in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store.
The Clinton-appointed judge ruled that a jury’s verdict in May in Carroll’s other lawsuit against Trump, finding him liable for the assault itself and defaming Carroll, controls in the defamation case at issue.
“[T]he jury found that Mr. Trump knew that his statement that Ms. Carroll lied about him sexually assaulting her for improper and ulterior purposes was false or that he acted with reckless disregard to whether it was false,” Kaplan wrote in his 25-page opinion. “Whether Mr. Trump made the 2019 statements with actual malice raises the same issue.”
The former Elle magazine advice columnist’s lawsuit seeks civil damages for defamation, saying Trump stained her reputation by denying that he sexually assaulted her some 25 years earlier inside a dressing room in the lingerie section of Bergdorf Goodman.
Carroll's attorney Roberta "Robbie" Kaplan, of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, celebrated Wednesday's ruling,
“We look forward to trial limited to damages for the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made about our client E Jean Carroll in 2019," she said in email Wednesday afternoon.
Trump's New Jersey-based attorneys in the case, Alina Habba and Michael Madaio, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Carroll's $10 million civil defamation claim arises from then-President Trump’s 2019 denial of her account when she first publicly came forward. She detailed the assault in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal” and an excerpt published in New York Magazine.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,” Trump said in June 2019, among other repeated denials insisting Carroll was making up the story.
Jurors awarded Carroll $5 million following the seven-day battery and defamation trial. That case, dubbed “Carroll II,” was filed under a 2022 New York law allowing survivors a one-year window to file time-barred claims.
The second case advanced to trial ahead of Carroll’s first lawsuit due to years of litigation over whether or not Trump can have the Department of Justice step in as a proxy defendant. In July 2023, the department under President Joe Biden formally abandoned its efforts to do so.
Trump's defense appealed the battery and defamation verdict to Second Circuit Court of Appeals and sought a stay of the pending defamation trial while a panel of judges considers the appeal.
Trump meanwhile faces 91 felony counts across four state and federal jurisdictions — in Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia — while currently standing as the frontrunner of the 2024 Republican presidential primary polling.
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