Roberta Kaplan, the attorney for writer E. Jean Carroll who helped secure an eye-popping $83.3 million verdict last week against Donald Trump, told Politico on Thursday that the former president made a critical error that opened the door to her successful lawsuit against him.
In particular, Kaplan said Trump made a grievous error when he attacked Carroll by name after she alleged that he raped her in the 1990s, which was something he did not do with the dozens of other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct over the years.
"E. Jean said in her deposition that she had an incident with Les Moonves once in an elevator in L.A. where he kind of pushed up against her, and she said he was like an octopus," Kaplan explained. "She was asked in her deposition, in our case, 'Why didn’t you sue Les Moonves?' The answer was because a lot of women accused him, and he just did a blanket denial — a group denial of all of them... If Donald Trump had done that here, I wouldn’t have sued him."
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Kaplan added that Trump compounded this mistake by accusing Carroll of lying about him for financial benefit.
"What was so offensive about it was the idea that she was just making it up to sell a book or two as part of a Democratic plot," Kaplan said.