Donald Trump has counter-sued the advice columnist who won a $5 million (€4.5 million) jury award against him after accusing him of rape, saying she owes him money and a retraction for defaming him by continuing to insist she was raped even after a jury declined to agree.
Lawyers Alina Habba and Michael T Madaio, representing the Republican candidate for president, filed papers to say writer E Jean Carroll should pay unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and retract her damaging statements.
The counter-suit came two weeks after US District Judge Lewis A Kaplan accepted a rewritten defamation lawsuit from Ms Carroll which seeks at least $10 million more in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages for comments Mr Trump made after the jury verdict last month.
The jury concluded after a two-week trial that he sexually abused her in a luxury department store dressing room in spring 1996. It also found that he defamed her in comments he made denying the attack in a statement last October and in a deposition the same month.
But the jury rejected Ms Carroll’s claims, first made in a 2019 memoir, that Mr Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
At trial, Ms Carroll said the rape occurred after a flirtatious chance encounter at the Manhattan store with Mr Trump turned into a violent assault as they each teased each other to try on a piece of lingerie he was seeking for a friend.
Mr Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president again next year, did not appear at the trial, but extensive excerpts of his recorded deposition were played for jurors, along with an infamous video revealed shortly before his 2016 election in which he bragged that celebrities can grab women sexually without consent.
He has consistently denied raping Ms Carroll or knowing her, and said the department store encounter never happened.
In his countersuit, his lawyers cited comments Ms Carroll made in an interview after May’s verdict, saying that when she was questioned about the jury’s finding that she was not raped, she responded: “Oh yes he did, oh yes he did.”
They said she also revealed that when she spoke to Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina immediately after the verdict, she said she told him emphatically: “He did it and you know it.”
The lawyers wrote that Ms Carroll “made these statements knowing each of them were false or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity”.
“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,” they added.
In response to Mr Trump’s counter-claim, Carroll lawyer Robbie Kaplan said the former president “again argues, contrary to both logic and fact, that he was exonerated by a jury that found that he sexually abused E Jean Carroll”.
She said four of five statements cited by the counter-claim were made outside the one-year statute of limitations when a claim must be made and that the other will be dismissed by the judge.
“Trump’s filing is thus 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,” Ms Kaplan said.
