Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected this week a push from former President Donald Trump for either a new trial or a legal move known as dismissal as a matter of law in the context of civil claims brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll. Carroll’s claims culminated in January in tens of millions of dollars in penalties on the former president imposed by a federal jury for upheld allegations of defamation.
In his decision, Kaplan shredded the suggestion from the Trump team that there’s a meaningful possibility of tying damages suffered by Carroll to an initial news article that shared her account of Trump sexually assaulting her during the 1990s. That scenario could take some weight away from antagonistic statements that Trump made while president, harshly lambasting Carroll’s account.
“Mr. Trump argues in substance that the jury could not reasonably have found that his June 21 and 22, 2019 statements caused any harm to Ms. Carroll because the proof failed to exclude the possibility that some part of the damage to Ms. Carroll, however small, was attributable at least in part to Ms. Carroll’s own allegations against Mr. Trump,” the judge wrote Thursday.
He added, in a stern Trump rejection: “It ignores the fact that those defamatory statements were viewed between at least 85 to 104 million times, whereas there is no evidence at all as to the dissemination of The Cut article to which defendant seeks to assign all of the damages suffered by Ms. Carroll and which was not even alleged to have been defamatory. It ignores as well the fact that the jury was entitled to believe Ms. Carroll’s testimony as to the impact of the June 21 and 22 statements on her.”
Trump, meanwhile, is currently on trial elsewhere in New York City’s courts for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with hush money from before the 2016 elections for a woman named Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had an affair with the ex-president. Trial was continuing on Thursday with further testimony from media figure David Pecker, who was alleging an incriminating portrait of his past interactions with Trump and the former president’s team.
