Legal analysts debate whether E. Jean Carroll has a case against CNN for recent Trump comments

Legal analysts on Thursday discussed whether columnist E. Jean Carroll could sue Donald Trump yet again for defamation after his CNN appearance, at which he repeated comments deemed defamatory by a jury just days before.

And experts wondered if CNN could also be held culpable for platforming somebody likely to defame Carroll, the way that Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for giving a stage to 2020 election conspiracy theorists.

In the case of CNN, the network wasn't reporting what Trump said, it gave Trump an opportunity to say it himself in prime time. The network didn't indicate whether Trump was given any warnings ahead of time about what he could or couldn't say.

Carroll's legal camp said Thursday that she is considering taking further action against Trump.

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MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who was in the courtroom for the trial of Carroll v. Trump, brought up the idea of whether Carroll could make a go at a suit.

"Tonight felt like watching a bad law school exam fact pattern unravel. And now, I am pondering the preclusive effect, if any, of yesterday’s verdict on Trump’s defenses to any new claims by E. Jean Carroll or just elements thereof (e.g., the falsity prong of defamation)," said Rubin. "And the other pressing question: Would Trump be the sole defendant?" she added, alluding to CNN.

On MSNBC's Deadline Thursday, former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Weissman said, "The issue here is not so much will E. Jean Carroll be able to bring a case against Donald Trump? Of course she could. I doubt she's going to because she just prevailed.

"...But the other person at the table here is CNN. This is one where they're going to start becoming dangerously close to reckless disregard and actual malice because they know what he's going to say in advance."

On Tuesday, a jury found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in the mid-'90s, and then he defamed her by denying the attack. He again denied it Wednesday, saying that he had no idea who Carroll was.

Responding to a comment by Twitter user Michael O'Grady, who posted that Trump's CNN performance "requires" that Carroll sue him again, former federal prosecutor and University of Alabama School of Law professor Joyce White Vance said that, even if Carroll could sue Trump, she was empathetic to the idea that Carroll "has carried enough of the Trump burden for one woman. A jury vindicated her. If she chooses to sue again, more power to her, but I think she's earned a little peace."

Rubin agreed: "Whether [Carroll] could successfully sue Trump for his comments last night is an interesting thought experiment (and one I’ll confess I could nerd out on) but maybe besides the point. Why are we entitled to demand anything of her? As Joyce White Vance notes below, we’re not."

By Thursday afternoon, Carroll's lawyer released a statement that they were looking through options.

“Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it,” Carroll's lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, said. “We have to weigh the various pros and cons and we’ll come to a decision in the next day or so, probably.”

“It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people,” Carroll told The New York Times. She said she had been “insulted by better people.”

During her show on Thursday, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace wondered what “it says that in a post-Dominion world where the reputational damage to Fox was as much a factor, if the reporting is to be believed, as the settlement… we have another network simultaneously re-platforming Trump while Fox News deplatforms its biggest purveyor of disinformation, Tucker Carlson."

Speaking to CNN on Thursday afternoon, former Ethics Czar Norm Eisen agreed, Carroll should suit up for a battle, at least when it comes to Trump.