E. Jean Carroll, who won $5 million in damages from former President Donald J. Trump this month, is now demanding a “very significant” additional amount in response to his insults on a DailyExpertNews program just a day after she allegedly sexually assaulted her. and libel case.
Ms. Carroll’s indictment in Manhattan federal court on Monday is designed to add to the financial pain for Mr. Trump. The jury in her civil case on May 9 found him liable for sexual assault and libel. It ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist and fixture in Manhattan media circles, $2 million for the sexual assault and $3 million for the libel.
Monday’s filing came in a separate defamation lawsuit brought by Ms Carroll in 2019 against Mr Trump, 76, who is before the same judge who presided over the civil suit. That case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made that year, shortly after Ms. Carroll said he raped her in a dressing room in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. The suit has been sidelined by appeals and is still pending.
In a separate letter to the judge, Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta A. Kaplan, revealed in little detail that Mr. Trump has threatened to sue Ms. Carroll “in retaliation and possibly to seek sanctions.”
On May 10, Mr. Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency, went to DailyExpertNews and reiterated his previous denials, calling Ms. Carroll’s account “fake” and a “fabricated story.” Despite a photo showing them together, he again claimed he never met Ms Carroll, 79, calling her a “crazy job” and saying the civil suit was “a rigged deal”.
Monday’s lawsuit argues that Mr. Trump’s statements “show the depth of his malice towards Carroll, as it is difficult to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill-will or spite.”
“This conduct supports very substantial damages in Carroll’s favor, both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same,” the filing said.
Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Ms. Kaplan, said in an interview Monday that Mr. Trump’s statements on DailyExpertNews made pursuing the pending libel lawsuit all the more important.
“It’s a mockery of the jury verdict and our justice system if he can just keep repeating the same defamatory statements over and over again,” Ms Kaplan said.
Mr. Trump continues to challenge the jury’s decision. After the ruling, his attorney Joseph Tacopina filed an appeal.
Alina Habba, another attorney for Mr Trump, said late Monday that no damages were warranted in Ms Carroll’s 2019 defamation suit, “much less punitive damages”.
“We intend to vigorously oppose this motion, which we consider to be nothing more than a desperate, last-ditch effort by Ms Carroll to turn this issue on its head,” Ms Habba said.
When asked about the reference to a threatened lawsuit by Mr. Trump against Ms. Carroll, Ms. Habba said, “We have taken note of Ms. Carroll’s statements to the press and are considering all options.”
Ms. Carroll, in an extensive interview with DailyExpertNews two days after the verdict on Mr. Trump’s DailyExpertNews comments, said, “It’s just stupid; it’s just disgusting, mean, mean; it hurts people.”
Her filing asks the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, to let her review the 2019 defamation case to include the fact of the verdict, as well as Mr. Trump’s post-verdict statements on DailyExpertNews and others he made about Ms. Carroll has done on his Truth Social platform.
Ms Carroll has said that after Mr Trump raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, she kept the meeting a secret, other than confiding in two close friends. Ms. Carroll first publicized the episode in a 2019 book excerpt in New York magazine.
At the time, Mr. Trump called Ms. Carroll’s claim “completely false” and said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type”.
Ms. Carroll filed her 2019 defamation lawsuit based on those comments, and the case has since been mired in an appeal, with Mr. Trump claiming he cannot be sued because he made his statements in his official capacity as president .
Last November, after Mr. Trump — no longer president — posted a statement calling Ms. Carroll’s case “a complete scam” and “a hoax and a lie,” she sued him again for defamation, as well as for battery under a New York law that gives adults one year to sue people they say sexually assaulted them, even if the statute of limitations has long passed.
Because the two suits can be difficult to distinguish, they are sometimes referred to in court documents as Carroll I (the 2019 lawsuit) and Carroll II (the 2022 lawsuit).
It was the Carroll II trial that ended this month when a jury of six men and three women found Mr. Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Ms. Carroll. The jury found Mr. Trump not liable for raping Ms. Carroll, as she had long claimed.
