A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s defamation case against E. Jean Carroll.
In late June President Trump hit back at E. Jean Carroll with a defamation lawsuit, saying she falsely accused him of rape. This countersuit comes after a civil jury found him “guilty of sexual abuse and defamation,” but not rape, in May.
Filed in Manhattan federal court, Trump’s counterclaim cites Carroll’s post-verdict comments on CNN.
Trump sought a retraction as well as compensatory and punitive damages.
According to the court filing, Trump “has been the subject of significant harm to his reputation, which, in turn, has yielded an inordinate amount of damages sustained as a result.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, dismissed Trump’s case AND also granted E. Jean Carroll’s legal team authority to hand over tapes of Trump’s deposition to the Manhattan DA’s office.
Trump’s lawyers had previously tried to block the deposition tapes from being delivered to the DA’s office.
Fox News reported:
A federal judge dismissed a counterclaim by former President Donald Trump in the defamation case leveled against him by E. Jean Carroll on Monday.
Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York dismissed Trump’s claims that Carroll made false statements during the case that damaged his reputation.
Carroll was awarded $5 million in May in a similar case against Trump after a jury found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in 1996 and then defamed her in 2022.
Kaplan also handed down another order granting Carroll’s legal team authority to deliver tapes of Trump’s deposition in the case to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Trump’s legal team had sought to block the DA’s office from obtaining the tapes.
The Justice Department recently reversed course and said Trump can be held personally liable in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit.
This is a reversal from the DOJ’s position that Trump was protected by the Westfall Act because he was president when he made the statements about E. Jean Carroll.
In 2019, E. Jean Carroll alleged Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations and called E. Jean Carroll a “whack job” who’s “not my type.”
In May the jury found Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages.
Trump blasted E Jean. Carroll during a CNN town hall a couple of weeks after the verdict.
“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?” Trump said, adding the accusation was a ‘fake’ and ‘made-up story.’
E. Jean Carroll went after Trump again and sought new substantial damages over his statements during the CNN town hall even though a jury already concluded Trump did not rape the woman!
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to Judge Lewis Kaplan) cheered the DOJ’s reversal and said it was one of the last obstacles to the latest lawsuit reaching trial.
“We are grateful that the Department of Justice has reconsidered its position,” Kaplan said in a statement. “We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will, and spite, and not as President of the United States.”
The trial is scheduled for next January.
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