Donald Trump on Monday again denied E. Jean Carroll’s allegations that he raped and defamed her, even as he faces nearly $90 million in civil penalties for similar statements about the writer.
Carroll’s lawyer quickly responded that the author’s legal team was closely monitoring Trump’s recent comments about her – and suggested that the former president may be facing a third defamation lawsuit.
Trump said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that several civil court rulings against him in New York – two of them in Carroll’s favor – will cause companies to leave the state.
“People don’t move to New York because they do this crap to me,” he said.
They were “the most ridiculous decisions,” Trump said, “including the ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, a person I had never met before.”
Carroll said Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
“I have no idea who she is, except for one thing: I was sued,” he said in the interview Monday. “From then on I said, ‘Wow, this is crazy what this is.'”
“I was indicted, I was given a false accusation and I had to post a $91 million bond on a false accusation,” Trump added, referring to the bail he received in recent days to secure the recent verdict in Carroll’s favor in Manhattan federal court.
The interview echoed comments Trump made about Carroll over the weekend at a campaign rally in Georgia, where the presumptive Republican presidential nominee accused her of making “false accusations.”
After the CNBC interview aired, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement, “The statute of limitations for defamation is between one and three years in most jurisdictions.”
“As we said after the jury’s latest verdict, we continue to monitor every statement Donald Trump makes about our client E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.
George Conway, a lawyer and leading Trump critic who encouraged Carroll to file her first defamation lawsuit against him, said in a tweet on Monday that the former president had faced a third lawsuit from the writer.
“The fact that Trump slandered @ejeancarroll on @CNBC @SquawkCNBC is significant on both substantive and procedural grounds,” Conway wrote in his post on social media site X.
Since Trump’s comments were made on the CNBC show, which airs from Manhattan, Carroll “could now likely sue in the same federal court” where she filed her first two lawsuits against him, Conway wrote in his post on the social media Page X
“If she does so, the case would be assigned to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan as a case related to the two prior cases that resulted in $88.3 million in damages,” Conway wrote. The judge is not related to Carroll’s attorney.
In a 2019 magazine article, Carroll publicly accused Trump of raping her for the first time.
She then sued him in federal court in Manhattan for defamation after the then-president denied the rape allegations, accusing him of fabricating her account out of political animosity and a desire to boost sales of her book.
Carroll sued Trump again in the same court in late 2022 for assault related to the alleged rape and defamation related to new comments he made about her.
Trump, who has since left the White House, also referred to Carroll as “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman.”
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2024-03-12 12:54:03
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