Donald Trump appears at a rally. E. Jean Carroll enters federal court in Manhattan for the first day of trial against him. (Photos l-r: Emily Elconin/Getty Images; AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)
Former President Donald Trump has accused the woman he was found to have sexually assaulted defamed him by insisting that he raped her.
In a counterclaim to E. Jean Carroll’s amended complaint in her defamation case against the former president, Trump said that her continued insistence that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s amounts to defamation. He specifically points to her statement in a May 10 CNN interview — one day after a federal jury unanimously found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed Carroll —where she was asked about the jury’s finding that he did not rape her.
“Oh yes he did,” Carroll said. “Oh yes he did.”
Trump’s filing notes the jury didn’t reach that same conclusion.
Carroll’s “actions of wantonly and falsely accusing [Trump] on multiple occasions of committing rape constitute defamation per se, as [Carroll] accused Trump of rape, which clearly was not committed, according to the jury verdict[.]”
Also in the CNN interview, Trump’s counterclaim notes, Carroll said that she told Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina that “he did it and you know it.”
The counterclaim alleges that Carroll’s statements have caused significant damage to Trump, who has been accused of sexual abuse or assault by dozens of women.
“Due to [Carroll’s] repeated falsehoods and defamatory statements” made against Trump, he “has been the subject of significant harm to his reputation, which, in turn, has yielded an inordinate amount of damages sustained as a result,” says the counterclaim, filed Tuesday.
Trump says that Carroll “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 [the case] whereby [Trump] was found not liable for rape by the jury.”
In May, a jury found that Trump had sexually abused the writer in the department store dressing room and later defamed her while denying the allegations. Trump was not found to have raped Carroll. The jury awarded her $5 million in damages.
On May 22, Carroll filed an amended complaint, citing derisive comments Trump made — also on CNN the day after the verdict — and ratcheting up her award demand to $10 million.
Read Trump’s counterclaim, below.
Adam Klasfeld contributed to this report.
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