Trump makes new pitch to get E. Jean Carroll defamation suit tossed

In newly filed court papers, former President Donald Trump on Monday made a fresh push to get defamation claims against him dismissed by saying his denial that he raped author E. Jean Carroll was truthful – and a jury has already agreed with him.

Trump was found liable of sexual abuse last month after claims by Carroll that he attacked her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. But the jury did not find him liable of rape.

The New York Times reported Trump's latest court filing is in regards to another case Carroll had filed in 2019 – and which is still going through the courts – in which she accused Trump of defaming her after she publicly disclosed the alleged rape in a magazine article. Trump called her accusation “totally false,” and said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type."

Based on a civil jury's verdict last month which awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her and for defaming her when he called her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie” last October, Trump's lawyers argued that Carroll's second defamation claim referring to the rape accusations should be thrown out.

But, according to Carroll’s lawyer Roberta A. Kaplan, nothing about the verdict in the recent trial was inconsistent with Carroll’s claim.

“The jury unanimously found that Donald Trump forcibly inserted his fingers into E. Jean Carroll’s vagina and then lied about it, defaming her when he said that he did not know who she was, had never met her at Bergdorf Goodman, and that she had made the whole thing up as part of a ‘con job’ or a ‘hoax,’” Kaplan said.

“The jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump sexually abused her. As a result, the jury concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when he claimed otherwise," she added.