A follow-up defamation claim from writer E. Jean Carroll over comments Donald Trump made on his knock-off social media site Truth Social well after leaving office was upheld by federal Judge Lewis Kaplan ahead of trial next month.
The comments came in October of last year and followed an earlier allegation of defamation against Donald that covered remarks he made while still president. As legal disputes over whether procedural protections associated with the presidency can shield Trump from the earlier claim, he helped ensure he’d still face allegations of defamation with his own later rant well after exiting the presidency.
“And, while I am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type!” Trump proclaimed in the later rant. “She has no idea what day, what week, what month, what year, or what decade this so-called “event” supposedly took place. The reason she doesn’t know is because it never happened, and she doesn’t want to get caught up with details or facts that can be proven wrong… E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance. Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to “Trump”!”
His description of Carroll’s allegations is inaccurate in that she has been much more specific in her descriptions of the timing of the underlying claim of sexual assault that gave rise to the defamation contentions over Trump’s response and the accompanying claims in the second lawsuit that directly cover the attack Carroll says she suffered. Notably, Trump undercut his own claim that the writer wasn’t his so-called “type” by misidentifying her as a former wife of his in an old photograph in a deposition. In that same deposition, he also said that he was himself responsible for composing and posting the rant that later became the subject of the later allegations of defamation, and he yet again broadly maligned Carroll.
He also revealed some unsurprising details about the lack of substance behind some of his past comments about the writer, like an allegation of her supposedly Democratic leanings, which he credited to some other person who he didn’t even name. “Somebody told me early on that she was somehow aligned with Hillary Clinton,” Trump claimed in his deposition to Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for the writer. “She was either aligned with her or — I thought aligned with her.” The trial will have an anonymous jury.
