Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll filed a motion Monday to amend her lawsuit against former President Donald Trump to include comments he made during a CNN town hall after the ruling in her other lawsuit against him.
Trump called Carroll a “whack job” and denied the allegations that he sexually abused her in a dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the mid-1990s. His comments came while speaking at a CNN town hall the day after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a separate defamation lawsuit filed by Carroll.
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“I have no idea who this woman is. This is a fake story, a made-up story. We had a horrible Clinton-appointed judge. He was horrible. He allowed her to put everything in. He allowed us to put nothing in. This is a fake story,” Trump told Kaitlan Collins on CNN earlier this month.
In the amended complaint Carroll’s lawyers filed on Monday, her lawyers argue that Trump used his time on CNN to “demean and mock Carroll.”
“These and other similar messages are exactly what Trump intended. Trump used a national platform to demean and mock Carroll. He egged on a laughing audience as he made light of his violent sexual assault, called Carroll names, implied that Carroll was asking to be assaulted, and dismissed the jury’s verdict vindicating Carroll,” the filing said.
Carroll’s lawyers included the motion in a filing that proposed a schedule for the trial in the second of two defamation lawsuits filed by her against Trump. The proposed schedule by Carroll’s lawyers would give Trump’s lawyers until June 7 to oppose to the motion amend.
Shortly after Trump made the comments on CNN, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in an appearance on MSNBC that Trump’s comments were “definitely actionable.”
“So it’s definitely actionable,” Kaplan said. “And here, the cruelty will make him less wealthy. He is not going to get away with it another time. It’s unprecedented for a person to have been held liable in defamation to keep doing the defamation, so there are not a lot of cases that we can look to for a playbook about how to do it. But, suffice to say, I have a lot of lawyers who are very busy looking into this, and we are weighing all of our options.”
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The lawsuit in which the amendment was filed is the initial defamation lawsuit filed by Carroll in 2019 after Trump publicly denied her claims that he had raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s. The lawsuit has been on hold after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied a motion in April to merge this lawsuit and the one which was decided earlier this month.
In the other lawsuit filed by Carroll, a New York jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse against Carroll in civil court. Trump was not found liable for rape.
