After CNN’s disastrous townhall where they gave license to ex-president Donald Trump to freely spread lies on the network, E. Jean Carroll has decided to pursue further litigation against him.
Ms. Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s.
In 2019, Ms. Carroll wrote an article that appeared in New York Magazine, where she detailed her accusations against Trump. Trump denied the claims, and said that he had never met Carroll.
However, Ms. Carroll was able to provide a photograph of her socializing with Donald Trump in 1987.
Ms. Carroll sued Trump for defamation, a case that is still ongoing and has yet to reach trial. In November 2022, Ms. Carroll sued Trump for battery under the Adult Survivors Act law, which was passed the year before and allows victims of sexual assault in New York to file civil suits against their attackers regardless of the statute of limitations. A jury found Trump guilty of sexual assault, battery and defamation, and Ms. Carroll was awarded $5 million in damages.
Coming on the heels of his legal loss, Trump continued to defame Ms. Carroll during the CNN townhall. Ms. Carroll then asked the judge to expand her ongoing 2019 defamation case to include Trump’s comments post-verdict on both CNN and his social media network, Truth Social.
During an interview with the New York Times, Ms. Carroll stated, “It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people.”
Trump’s legal team has argued that he should not be held liable for his initial comments in 2019, because he was the sitting U.S. President at the time, and he made those comments in his official capacity as president.
In 2023, the D.C. Court of Appeals declined to rule in Trump’s favor, and remanded the case to U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, the same judge who presided over Ms. Carroll’s second lawsuit (which she won).
In the lawsuit, Ms. Carroll states that Trump damaged her reputation, and substantially harmed her professionally, which caused her emotional pain. In an email to NPR in 2019, Ms. Carroll stated, “Decades ago, the now President of the United States raped me. When I had the courage to speak out about the attack, he defamed my character, accused me of lying for personal gain, even insulted my appearance. No woman should have to face this. But this lawsuit is not only about me. I am filing this on behalf of every woman who has ever been harrassed, assaulted, silenced, or spoken up only to be shamed, fired, ridiculed and belittled.”
