U.S. out of Trump defamation lawsuit
Ruling revives rape accuser’s case
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’s bid to make the U.S. government the defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says President Donald Trump raped her decades ago, paving the way for the case to again proceed.
In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote that Trump did not qualify as a government “employee” under federal law, nor was he acting “within the scope of his employment” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he raped journalist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store during the 1990s.
Carroll sued Trump over that denial in New York in November, and last month, the Justice Department moved the case to federal court and asked a judge to substitute the U.S. government as the defendant. The department argued Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States” when he disputed Carroll’s allegations.
“The President of the United States is not an ‘employee of the Government’ within the meaning of the relevant statutes,” the judge wrote. “Even if he were such an ‘employee,’ President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements concerning Ms. Carroll would not have been within the scope of his employment.”
A month before the Justice Department intervened, a New York judge had rejected Trump’s bid to delay the case. That put Carroll’s team on course to seek a DNA sample for comparison to biological material found on the dress Carroll says she wore the day she was sexually assaulted, as well as an under-oath interview from the president, through a process known as discovery.
It is possible there will be more arguments over those and other discovery matters, with the president fighting the case in his personal capacity. The Justice Department could also appeal the ruling.
A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, said she was “very pleased that the federal court interpreted the plain text of Federal Tort Claims Act as not covering President Trump’s false statements about our client.”
Attorney General William Barr, though, defended the move to intervene, asserting that legal precedent was on the government’s side and that any uproar was the result of the country’s “bizarre political environment.”
He said the White House had sent a memorandum to the Justice Department seeking the intervention, and civil litigation experts at the department agreed, in keeping with the normal procedure for such legal questions.
Tuesday’s ruling hinged on technical questions having to do with two laws — the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA, and the Westfall Act — which govern how and when federal employees can be sued. The judge wrote that he had to assess first whether Trump, as president, counted as a federal “employee” under the law, and if he did, he had to weigh whether the statements about Carroll came within the scope of that employment.
“The answer to both questions is ‘no,’ ” the judge wrote. “While the president possesses all of the executive power of the United States, he is not an ‘employee’ within the meaning of the FTCA.”
The Justice Department had argued in a written filing earlier this month that past court cases had concluded that any public statements that reflect on the character and trustworthiness of a public official fall under the law. Because Carroll’s accusation called into question “the President’s fitness for office,” the Justice Department lawyers argued, “a response was necessary for the President to effectively govern.”
Carroll, a former longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, said in her lawsuit that in the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996 she and Trump met in a chance encounter at the Bergdorf Goodman store.
She said they they made their way to a dressing room, where she said Trump pushed her against a wall and raped her. The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
Trump said Carroll was “totally lying” to sell a memoir and that he’d never met her, though a 1987 photo showed them and their then-spouses at a social event. He said the photo captured a moment when he was standing in a line.