Columnist E Jean Carroll is seeking an additional $10 million in damages from former President Donald Trump over comments he made about her in his town hall with CNN.
The writer’s legal team filed new legal papers in a Manhattan federal court on Monday, May 23, just two weeks after winning $5million when a jury found Trump, 76, liable of sexual abuse and defamation.
Her lawyers amended a separate defamation lawsuit to include the remarks he made to Kaitlan Collins on May 10 and a Truth Social post calling the New York verdict on May 9 a ‘disgrace’.
Trump’s defamatory statements post-verdict show the depth of his malice toward Carroll since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite,’ her lawyers wrote. ‘This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award.’
Carroll claims Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s. He has consistently denied the allegations and called them a ‘complete con job’.
Carroll told the New York Times earlier this month that she was considering filing another defamation suit after Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins her story was ‘fake’ and ‘made up’.
He also mocked her ‘hanky panky’ claims, called her a ‘whack job’ and claimed the judge banned his legal team from entering evidence that Carroll called her husband an ‘ape’ and had a cat ‘named Vagina’.
‘It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people,’ Carroll told The Times.
Following a two-week trial, the jury found Trump liable in the civil case for abuse and defamation but not rape, after just under three hours of deliberations.
Trump then filed an appeal on the same day Carroll hinted she would sue again.
Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina had previously said he would appeal the verdict and said the former president could never get a fair trial in New York.
His notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was filed hours after U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a ruling awarding Carroll the judgment and closing the case.
In the televised town hall, Trump made several disparaging comments about Carroll that elicited applause and laughter from the audience of New Hampshire Republicans and independent voters who plan to vote in the state’s Republican primary.
The town hall was his first public appearance since the Carroll verdict. Collins pressed Trump over what happened and the potential impact on his political future.
‘What do you say to voters who say it disqualifies you from being president?’ Collins asked him.
‘There weren’t too many of them because my numbers just – they went up,’ Trump said as the audience cheered and applauded.
The former president repeated his claim he didn’t know Carroll and then proceeded to insult her repeatedly – accusing her of ‘hanky panky,’ claiming she has a cat called ‘Vagina’ and that she called her husband an ‘ape’. He slammed U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who was appointed to the job by President Bill Clinton.
‘This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is. I had a picture taken years ago with her and her husband, nice guy John Johnson. He was a newscaster, very nice. She called him an ape, happens to be African American. Called him an ape,’ Trump claimed.
‘The judge wouldn’t allow us to put that in. Her dog or her cat was named Vagina, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in,’ he added.
‘We had a horrible Clinton appointed judge. He allowed her to put everything in,’ he said.
Trump also launched into a recounting of Carroll’s claims in a mocking voice, drawing laughs from the audience. He referred to Carroll as ‘a wack job.’
Trump also said of Carroll: ‘What kind of a woman meet somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, I don’t know if she was married then or not. John Johnson, I feel sorry for you.’
Collins also asked Trump if he wanted to take back comments he made during a taping of Access Hollywood, where he talked about grabbing women by the p**** and said famous people were allowed to do things like that.
‘I said women let you, I didn’t say you grab… I said women let — you know, you didn’t use that word — but if you look, women let you,’ Trump said.
‘Now, they said will you take that back? I said, look, for a million years this is the way it’s been. I want to be honest this is the way it’s been,’ he added.
‘You would like me to take that back. I can’t take it back because it happens to be true,’ he noted.
Trump calls E. Jean Carroll case a ‘scam’ after verdict
