Former president Donald Trump has filed a counterclaim against the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a $5 million verdict against him in a sexual assault and defamation lawsuit last month, contending that she has since defamed him.
Trump’s filing late Tuesday night in federal court in Manhattan points to instances before and after the verdict, including during a CNN interview, in which Carroll has said publicly that Trump raped her.
The jury last month found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the mid-1990s in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store but did not find him liable for raping her, as she long claimed.
Carroll, the filing claims, “made these false statements with actual malice and ill will with an intent to significantly and spitefully harm and attack [Trump’s] reputation, as these false statements were clearly contrary to the jury verdict.”
In a statement, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, called Trump’s filing “nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability for what a jury has already found to be his defamation of E. Jean Carroll.”
“But whether he likes it or not, that accountability is coming very soon,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan also said most of the statements by Carroll cited in the Trump filing were made outside of New York’s one-year statute of limitations.
The counterclaim is included in a filing by Trump in response to an amended lawsuit by Carroll that accuses Trump of additional defamation for comments Trump made during a CNN special event May 10 — just after the jury’s $5 million verdict in the other complaint. That case is scheduled for trial in January.
In the counterclaim, Trump’s lawyers highlight a CNN interview the day after the verdict in which Carroll was asked about the jury’s finding that Trump was not liable for rape.
“Oh yes he did, oh yes he did,” Carroll responded.
“The interview was on television, social media and multiple internet websites, with the intention of broadcasting and circulating these defamatory statements among a significant portion of the public,” Trump’s lawyers say in the filing.
Carroll first publicly accused Trump of rape in 2019, during his presidency, repeating the allegations in her writing, and in court filings and media interviews.
Trump responded with vehement denials, including a statement he posted on social media last year dismissing the allegations as a “Hoax and a lie.” Carroll then sued him for battery and defamation.
Trump, 77, has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual assault or misconduct over the years, but never before had any of those claims been fully litigated in court and decided by a jury. He assailed the $5 million verdict in the Carroll case as a “disgrace” and is appealing it. Trump was ordered to deposit money as that plays out.
The Carroll case is among an array of legal challenges facing the former president.
Trump is to face a criminal trial in New York in March on charges of falsification of business records related to hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign.
He has been indicted in Miami on federal charges that he broke the law dozens of times by keeping and hiding top-secret government documents in his Florida home after his presidency had ended.
And he is under investigation in Fulton County, Ga., and in D.C., respectively, for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and in relation to activities leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Andrea Salcedo and Shayna Jacobs contributed to this report.
