rump's Defense Argued That Defamation Claim By New York Writer Must Be Dismissed
A New York writer who received a USD 5 million jury award against ex-President Donald Trump cannot win an ongoing defamation action against him since the jury agreed with Trump that he never raped her, his lawyers told a judge on Monday.
The lawyers urged Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to deny columnist E. Jean Carroll’s request for a second judgement of $10 million or more by amending the 4-year-old complaint against Trump to fit with the jury’s conclusions last month that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll but did not rape her.
The lawsuit was filed after Carroll revealed publicly for the first time in a 2019 biography that Trump assaulted her in a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
The lawsuit has been delayed because the US Justice Department wants to replace Trump as the defendant with the United States on the grounds that he was acting in his role as president when he spoke on the matter in response to reporter inquiries in 2019.
After a civil jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll with comments last year and awarded $5 million in damages, Carroll’s lawyers urged Kaplan to amend the original defamation action to seek $10 million in compensatory damages.
They also attempted to add defamation charges to the original case, citing remarks made by Trump, 76, at a CNN town hall shortly after the jury verdict.
The jury result, according to Trump’s lawyers, supports Trump’s stance in the upcoming case that he never defamed Carroll by claiming he never raped her because the jury rejected the rape claim at trial.
Trump, who did not attend the trial, is appealing the jury’s decision.
Kaplan must determine whether to accept the rewritten defamation claim and Carroll’s allegation that the pending defamation case could proceed directly to the penalty phase of a trial because a jury had already concluded that Trump sexually abused Carroll. He must also rule whether the United States can be replaced as the defendant in place of Trump, thereby rendering the action null and void.
In response to Trump’s attorneys’ petition, attorney Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, said in a statement Monday that the jury verdict backed the arguments in the pending litigation.
“A unanimous jury found that Donald Trump inserted his fingers into E. Jean Carroll’s vagina against her will and then defamed her when he said that he did not know who E. Jean Carroll was, that he had never met her at Bergdorf Goodman, and that she had made the whole story up as part of a con job’ or hoax,'” Kaplan said.
“Contrary to Donald Trump’s latest arguments, the jury’s verdict makes complete sense — because the jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump had sexually abused her, it concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when he later claimed otherwise,” she added.
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