Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of rape.
In May Manhattan jury reached a verdict in the E. Jean Carroll rape/defamation case.
In 2019, E. Jean Carroll alleged Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations and called E. Jean Carroll a “whack job” who’s “not my type.”
The jury found Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages.
Trump blasted E. Jean. Carroll during a CNN town hall in May.
“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?” Trump said, adding the accusation was a ‘fake’ and ‘made-up story.’
She went after Trump again and Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed with E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers and said Trump is liable for his statements.
The trial will begin on January 15, 2024.
CNBC reported:
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims he had raped her decades earlier.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, as part of that ruling, said that the upcoming trial for Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Trump will only deal with the question of how much the former president should pay her in monetary damages for defaming her.
Normally, a jury would determine at trial whether a defendant is liable for civil damages claimed by a plaintiff.
But Kaplan found that Carroll was entitled to a partial summary judgment on the question of Trump’s liability in the case because jurors at a trial in a separate, but related lawsuit in May found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and had defamed in statements he made as he denied her allegation last fall.