Judge denies Trump’s motion for new trial in Carroll defamation case
Jack Birle
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A federal judge in New York denied former President Donald Trump‘s motion for a new trial in the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.
Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York defended the trial, which resulted in a jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape, and awarded Carroll roughly $5 million in damages, in a filing on Wednesday.
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“The jury in this case did not reach ‘a seriously erroneous result.’ Its verdict is not ‘a miscarriage of justice.’ Mr. Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages or a remittitur is denied,” Kaplan wrote.
Trump’s lawyers amended their appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to include Kaplan’s rejection of the motion for a new trial in a filing on Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyers had argued the damages awarded to Carroll by the jury were “grossly excessive under the applicable case law” in the motion for the new trial filed last month.
The former president himself has claimed the verdict was “a miscarriage of justice and a total scam,” also alleging that “the trial was very unfair.”
Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a department store in New York City in the mid-1990s and further accused him of defaming her for statements he made in response to her accusations. The allegations are the subject of two separate defamation trials, one filed in 2019 and another filed in 2022. The 2022 lawsuit was decided in May, with Trump being ordered to pay roughly $5 million in damages.
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In the 2019 lawsuit, the DOJ declined to certify that Trump was acting within his role as president when he made the comments Carroll claims are defamatory in a letter filed to the court last week, and Trump filed a countersuit over comments Carroll made on CNN in May in which she claimed Trump had raped her despite a jury rejecting the rape claim.
Carroll’s lawyers have filed a motion to dismiss Trump’s counterclaim, arguing that it is a “tit for tat” designed to “spin” the former president’s loss in the trial.