- Carroll wants to amend his remaining lawsuit by removing the word “rape” and adding new alleged defamation.
- Trump is now fighting those amendments and demanding that the word “rape” stay in the lawsuit.
- Her lawyers plan to argue that since a jury has now dismissed her rape claim, Trump has rightly called her a liar.
Donald Trump opposes any changes to writer E. Jean Carroll’s remaining libel lawsuit — and his lawyers particularly object to Carroll’s side dropping the word “rape.”
Removing “rape” and replacing it with the words “sexual assault,” as Carroll’s attorneys seek to do, would “seriously and unduly prejudice” Trump, his lawyers argued in a new court filing Friday.
That’s because Trump intends to fight Carroll’s remaining case by arguing he couldn’t have defamed her when he said she lied about a rape allegation because a The previous jury has now rejected that claim, according to the new filing.
Carroll’s proposed amended complaint “substitutes every reference to the word ‘rape’ and replaces it with ‘sexual assault,'” Trump attorney Alina Habba wrote in the filing, addressed to U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, presiding judge in both Carroll trials. defamation suits.
“The plaintiff’s position on this issue is clearly untenable,” Habba’s filing says, accusing Carroll’s side of trying to modernize the remaining trial to reflect a May 9 jury verdict that cleared Trump of rape while shaming him. finding him liable for sexual assault and defamation.
In 2019, Carroll, a longtime magazine columnist, publicly accused Trump of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She sued Trump twice for defamation after repeatedly calling her a liar.
His first lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court in 2020 and remains unsolved. He accuses Trump of defaming Carroll in statements he made in 2019 when he was still president. The lawsuit remained in legal limbo, with Trump arguing that he cannot be prosecuted for statements made in his official presidential capacity.
In her second lawsuit, also filed in Manhattan federal court, Carroll accused Trump of assault and battery — claiming he sexually assaulted and raped her — and accused Trump of later defaming her in statements that he had made after his presidency.
In that case, a federal jury in Manhattan found that Trump had effectively defamed and sexually abused Carroll and approved $5 million in damages. The jury stopped short of finding Trump responsible for an actual rape.
The day after the verdict, which Trump is appealing, he went on CNN and repeated some of the same defamatory statements.
Now Carroll is seeking additional damages and changing the lawsuit’s wording to reflect Trump’s most recent statements and the May 9 verdict.
It’s unclear when the judge will rule on Carroll’s requested changes; a lawyer for Carroll did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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