CARROLL SEEKS NEW DAMAGES FROM TRUMP
E. Jean Carroll, who this month won $5 million in damages from former President Donald Trump, is now seeking a “very substantial” additional amount in response to his insults on a CNN program just a day after she won her sexual abuse and defamation case.
Carroll’s filing Monday in Manhattan federal court seeks to intensify the financial pain for Trump. The jury in her civil case found him liable on May 9 for sexual abuse and defamation. It ordered him to pay Carroll, a former advice columnist and fixture in Manhattan’s media circles, $2 million for the sexual abuse and $3 million for the defamation.
Monday’s filing came in a separate defamation lawsuit that Carroll had filed in 2019 against Trump, 76, which is before the same judge who presided in the civil trial. The older case stemmed from comments Trump made that year, shortly after she said that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. That lawsuit had been sidetracked by appeals, but is still pending.
In a separate letter to the judge, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, revealed with little elaboration that Trump has threatened to file a lawsuit against Carroll “in retaliation and possibly to seek sanctions.”
On May 10, Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency, went on CNN and echoed his earlier denials about the episode, calling her account “fake” and a “made-up story.” Despite a photograph showing them together, he claimed again that he had never met Carroll, 79, called her a “wack job” and said the recent civil trial was “a rigged deal.”
The filing on Monday argues Trump’s defamatory statements after the May 9 verdict “show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite.”
“This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award 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 says.
After the verdict, Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina filed a notice of appeal.
Carroll’s lawyer, Kaplan, said in an interview Monday that Trump’s statements on CNN — “literally the day after the verdict” — made it all the more important for Carroll to pursue the pending defamation lawsuit.
In an interview two days after the verdict, Carroll said of Trump’s CNN comments: “It’s just stupid; it’s just disgusting, vile, foul; it wounds people.”
Her filing on Monday asks the judge, Lewis Kaplan of U.S. District Court, to let her revise her 2019 defamation lawsuit to include the fact of the jury’s verdict against Trump as well as his statements on CNN and others he made about Carroll on his Truth Social platform.