Former President Donald Trump is on the hunt for a new legal team to bring his appeal to the recent decision that he must pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social late Tuesday night that he is currently interviewing numerous law firms to represent him in his appeal of “one of the most ridiculous and unfair Witch Hunts our Country has ever seen – the defamation Sham.”
“Any lawyer who takes a TRUMP CASE is either ‘CRAZY,’ or a TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT. I will make my decision soon!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s comments suggest that Alina Habba, the attorney who helmed his original case, might have less or no involvement in his appeal. Although Trump lost the original case, he did not blame Habba or indicate he was unsatisfied with her work, and using news lawyers who are qualified to work in the appellate courts is normal practice.
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s remarks come after a jury decided last week to award Carroll the whopping multimillion-dollar sum as a result of her suing him for defamation in 2019. Carroll claimed Trump hurt her reputation by denying her allegation that he raped her and criticizing her for it while he was serving as president.
Carroll sued Trump a second time for defamation for similar comments he made about her on the same topic and also sued him for the alleged rape itself. She was awarded $5 million in that case last year.
Carroll, a longtime Elle columnist, claimed Trump raped her during a brief encounter in a department store in New York City in 1995 or 1996. She had been silent on the matter for nearly three decades before revealing the allegation through her memoir in 2019, but she said she had contemporaneously told two friends about it.
The jury in the second lawsuit, in which Trump was penalized with $5 million in damages, found Trump liable for defamation and for sexual abuse but not for rape. The case was a civil case rather than a criminal one because the statute of limitations on the rape allegation had lapsed.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the lawsuit that resulted in the $83 million in damages, already ruled ahead of the trial that Trump’s comments in that case were defamatory based on the other case’s jury finding that Trump defamed her for similar comments.
Among the dozens of comments Carroll cited in her two lawsuits, she pointed to Trump publicly calling her claims a “hoax,” saying Carroll was not his “type,” and accusing her of fabricating the rape accusation to promote her book sales.
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In his post about his appeal Tuesday night, Trump tore into Kaplan, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, for allowing two defamation trials. Trump called the judge a “Trump Hating Judge” and “highly partisan” and accused him of denying adequate due process in the case.
“This entire HOAX is a disgrace to our American System of Justice,” Trump wrote.
