Former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll was dismissed on Aug. 7.
A federal judge said Mr. Trump, 77, did not show that Ms. Carroll, 79, defamed him in comments on television after a jury convicted Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting the columnist.
Ms. Carroll said on CNN that Mr. Trump raped her, but the jury acquitted Mr. Trump of a rape charge. She also said that after the jury’s verdict was handed down, she told Mr. Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina, “he did it, and you know it.”
That triggered the countersuit against Ms. Carroll.
“Counterclaim Defendant made these false statements with actual malice and ill will with an intent to significantly and spitefully harm and attack Counterclaimant’s reputation, as these false statements were clearly contrary to the jury verdict in Carroll II whereby Counterclaimant was found not liable for rape by the jury,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers said.
They said the statements harmed Mr. Trump’s reputation and should result in damages.
Ms. Carroll’s attorneys said that the claim was “substantially true” because she was “reciting her own undisputed internal thoughts.”
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, overseeing the case, ruled in favor of Ms. Carroll.
Judge Kaplan wrote in his ruling that forcible digital penetration is often considered “rape” in other contexts, even though it does not rise to that standard in New York law.
“The difference between Ms. Carroll’s allegedly defamatory statements—that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as defined in the New York penal law—and the ’truth‘—that Mr. Trump forcibly digitally penetrated Ms. Carroll—is minimal,” Judge Kaplan said. “Both are felonious sex crimes. If Ms. Carroll had stated that Mr. Trump ’raped' her by forcibly digitally penetrating her vagina instead of referring also (allegedly to forcible penile penetration, there would have been no different effect on the mind of the average listener.”
The judge also said that the jury’s acquittal on the rape claim was not binding and therefore could not form the foundation of a defamation finding.
“We are pleased that the court dismissed Donald Trump’s counterclaim,” Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer representing Ms. Carroll, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Jury Decision
A jury in May concluded that Mr. Trump sexually abused Carroll in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s. Ms. Carroll could not recall the year in which the incident occurred, but says she remembers being attacked after meeting Mr. Trump inside the store.The jury awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages, including $3 million for defamation.
The civil case required establishing the claim by a “a preponderance of the evidence”—a legal standard meaning more likely than not, and lower than the “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement to establish a guilty verdict in criminal cases.
Ms. Carroll filed the suit in 2022, after New York legislators passed a bill that amended state law to give victims of certain sexual offenses a one-year window, beginning on Nov. 24, 2022, to file a civil lawsuit against alleged offenders. She had previously filed a defamation suit against Mr. Trump after he criticized her appearance and said he had never met her.
A federal appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is considering whether to act in the case or leave the verdict intact.
Another defamation claim from Ms. Carroll is advancing to a trial that is again slated to be overseen by Mr. Kaplan. The trial is scheduled to start in January 2024. Ms. Carroll is seeking another $10 million in damages.
Monday’s dismissal means the upcoming trial “will be limited to a narrow set of issues and shouldn’t take very long to complete,” Ms Kaplan said.
She added, “E. Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages based on the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made in 2019.”
