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MANHATTAN (CN) — Weeks after he was ordered to pay $5 million for the mid-1990s sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump countersued the longtime advice columnist, arguing she defamed him since a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexual abuse but not rape.
Carroll says Trump raped her in a fitting room at the famed Bergdorf Goodman department store. As she would later detail in a 2019 memoir, the two recognized each other — he was a real estate tycoon whose name peppered tabloid headlines, she was known for penning the Elle magazine column “Ask E. Jean” — and sparked up friendly banter that soon turned monstrous.
It took jurors less than three hours to find that Trump had sexually abused Carroll. As for her rape claims, however, they said she did not meet the burden of proof. The battery claim was filed under a New York law that allows a one-year window for survivors to file ordinarily time-barred claims against their abusers. Carroll also won her defamation claim against Trump, based on his denial of the attack.
On Tuesday night, Trump filed the counterclaim. It cites Carroll’s book excerpt, posts to Twitter and her 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 in Carroll II whereby [Trump] was found not liable for rape by the jury.”
The italicized Carroll II refers to the case that already went to trial; Carroll has a separate, still-pending defamation lawsuit against Trump in the Southern District of New York. Trial is set for January 2024, with Carroll asking for an additional $10 million.
Trump’s 27-page complaint penned by attorney Alina Habba claims that the former president suffered significant harm to his reputation because of Carroll’s statements.
“Despite a jury verdict to the contrary, Ms. Carroll persistently defames Mr. Trump and falsely accuses him of an act he did not commit,” Habba said in a statement. “As a result, we are filing a counterclaim … to seek damages to the fullest extent permitted by law.”
Robbie Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said the majority of the statements in Trump’s counterclaim are barred by New York’s one-year statute of limitations.
“Trump’s filing is thus nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability for what a jury has already found to be his defamation of E Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said in a statement. “But whether he likes it or not, that accountability is coming very soon.”
Carroll won $2 million in compensatory damages, plus $20,000 in punitive damages, in theseven-day trial. On the defamation count, Trump will have to pay $1.7 million in damages for a reputation repair program, plus $1 million in other damages. An expert for the writer testified that repairing damage to her name could cost up to $2.7 million.
The day after the verdict came down, Trump told a national audience during a town-hall event on CNN that Carroll was a “whack job” who made up the story.
“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes, you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, okay?” Trump said during the event.
Trump appealed the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and has also moved for a new trial in the Southern District of New York.
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