A federal judge rejected Donald Trump‘s attempt to dismiss writer E. Jean Carroll‘s first defamation lawsuit. Carroll accused Trump of defaming her after she accused him of raping her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s.
Judge Lewis Kaplan from the U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the former president’s arguments for dismissing the case “are without merit.”
Two days earlier, Trump filed a counterclaim against Carroll, saying she defamed him by continuing to publicly assert that he raped her. His complaint referred to Carroll’s comments made the day after a May 9 jury found that Trump owed her $5 million in damages but did not find him culpable for rape. In a CNN interview regarding the ruling that Trump did not commit rape, Carroll said, “Oh yes he did, oh yes he did.”
Trump’s lawyers tried to get the first lawsuit dismissed in December by declaring that he had “absolute immunity” since the remarks were made while he was president.
Kaplan rejected this, writing, “Mr. Trump does not identify any connection between the allegedly defamatory content of his statements … to any official responsibility of the president.”
Carroll filed her first lawsuit, which was only for defamation, against Trump in 2019. She accused him publicly in New York Magazine before the release of her memoir. Trump denied the claims, saying, “She’s not my type,” and that she lied to make her book more popular. In 2022, she filed a second lawsuit against Trump for both defamation and sexual assault after a New York law was passed giving survivors of sexual violence the chance to file suits even if the statute of limitations had passed.
In response, Trump said Carroll’s accusations were “fake” in a CNN town hall and called her a “whack job.” This led Carroll to amend her 2019 lawsuit to include Trump’s most recent remarks and argue for damages of more than $10 million. This case is scheduled to go to trial in January 2024.
