The Justice Department said on Tuesday it would no longer claim that President Donald J. Trump’s derogatory statements about E. Jean Carroll were made in 2019 as part of his official duties as president — a reversal that has given her case new impetus. gives.
Ms. Carroll, 79, who won $5 million in damages in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of sexual assault in the 1990s and defamation after he left the White House in January 2021, is now seeking a separate lawsuit because of comments he made while president. That case is on appeal. If a judge ultimately rules that those earlier remarks were part of Mr. Trump’s official duties, that case would most likely be dismissed.
The Justice Department had taken the position, first during the Trump administration and later under President Biden, that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity when he called Ms. Carroll a liar and denied her accusation that he raped her nearly 30 years ago . in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store.
But the department said in a court on Tuesday that new evidence had surfaced since Mr Trump, 77, left office — including in the recent civil trial in which a Manhattan jury found Mr Trump liable for sexually assaulting Ms Carroll decades ago .
The new set of facts suggests “that Mr. Trump was motivated by a ‘personal grievance’ that arose from events that occurred many years prior to Mr. Trump’s presidency,” the department’s attorneys said in the filing.
The lawyers noted that Mr. Trump’s 2019 statements about Ms. Carroll were made through official channels that presidents often use to communicate with the news media. But, they said, “While the statements themselves were made in a work context, the allegations that prompted the statements related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades before Mr. Trump’s presidency.”
A lawyer for Mr Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta A. Kaplan, said in a statement: “We are grateful that the Justice Department has reconsidered its position. We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animosity, ill will and spite, and not as President of the United States.”
Ms Carroll’s pending defamation lawsuit stems from Mr Trump’s words in 2019 after she first publicly accused him of shoving her against a dressing room wall at luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s, pulling her tights down and open his pants and force himself on her. Mrs. Carroll made her accusation in an excerpt from a book in New York magazine.
At the time, Mr Trump called Ms Carroll’s accusation “totally false”, said he had never met her and could not have raped her because she was not his “type”.
After Ms. Carroll filed a lawsuit, the Justice Department, then headed by Attorney General William P. Barr, intervened under a law that replaces the government as the defendant when a federal official is charged with official acts, which would lead to the dismissal of the case. .
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court, rejected the Department’s action, ruling that Mr. Trump’s remarks were “unrelated to the official business of the United States.”
A lengthy appeal ensued, with the case eventually being referred back to Judge Kaplan.
The judge asked the department to weigh in for a second time after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers reviewed her lawsuit to include another round of derogatory remarks from Mr. Trump, this time on DailyExpertNews on May 10, a day after the ruling in the process. .
Mr. Trump, in response to questions from the DailyExpertNews moderator, called Ms. Carroll a “crazy job” and said her assault claim was “phony” and a “fabricated story” and that her civil lawsuit was “a rigged deal.” .”
In their letter Tuesday, the department’s attorneys said the new evidence they were considering to reach their decision included the jury’s recent verdict, the new allegations in Ms. Carroll’s revised complaint and an assessment of a statement by Mr. Trump in connection with Ms. Carroll’s case. case.
“There is no longer sufficient basis for concluding that the former president was motivated by a ‘more than petty’ desire to serve the United States government,” the lawyers wrote.
