Donald Trump dealt another blow in his legal battle with E. Jean Carroll

In May, a jury found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in connection to E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her in 1996. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages – and now he has lost to Carroll in a second defamation suit.

In a 25-page opinion released today, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that “the trial in this case shall be limited to the issue of damages only” because Caroll had already proven in the first lawsuit that Trump acted with “actual malice.”

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This most recent lawsuit concerns statements Trump made in 2019 and 2022 in which he claimed Carroll’s accusations were “totally false” and asked his supporters to find proof that she was working for the Democratic Party or New York magazine, implying that she had a political agenda. He also accused her of trying to sell books with the accusation against him. In a third 2019 statement, he said Carroll was “not my type” and “it never happened.”

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He continued to attack her as recently as October 2022, when he posted a lengthy statement to his social media platform Truth Social calling her accusations “a complete con job” and saying he didn’t know who she is, despite evidence that he had met her.

According to Judge Kaplan, because a jury had already decided in May that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll, it automatically rendered his more recent statements false.

In May, Carroll’s out attorney Roberta Kaplan commented on the unique nature of the situation.

“It’s unprecedented for a person to have been held liable in defamation to keep doing the defamation,” Kaplan said. 

Carroll says Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-90s in a changing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. She wrote about the attack in 2019 in her book What do We Need Men For?