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Donald Trump could be made to pay millions more in damages to his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, as the second defamation trial involving the former president and the ex-Elle columnist gets underway.
Trump is accused of defaming Carroll while denying that he sexually assaulted her at a Bergdorf Goodman store in New York in the 1990s, including claiming she made up the attack to sell copies of her book. A civil trial to settle the case is set to begin in Manhattan on January 16.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the civil trial, has already ruled that Trump defamed Carroll with his 2019 comments, and the proceedings in New York will mainly determine the size of the penalty against the former president. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages from Trump in her defamation suit.
Bryan M. Sullivan, a lawyer who represents President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, previously told Newsweek that Trump is facing a major payout in the defamation lawsuit.
"E. Jean Carroll has a very strong case against Trump since it comes on the heels of a jury finding him liable and will likely lead to large punitive damages," Sullivan said.
The suit, which is due to be settled, is separate from a sexual battery and defamation civil case that Carroll already successfully won against the former president. In May 2023, a jury ruled Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll at the New York department store and then defaming her character while denying the assault took place. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's legal team via email for comment.
Tuesday's defamation suit was originally filed in 2019, but has been delayed through courts for years as Trump tried to argue that the comments he made while president are protected under absolute immunity.
In a June 2019 statement issued dismissing Carroll's assault claims, Trump said: "I've never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book; that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.
"The world should know what's really going on. It is a disgrace, and people should pay dearly for such false accusations," Trump added.
Trump told The Hill days later that the assault couldn't have taken place as "she's not my type."
Carroll later amended her 2019 lawsuit to include comments that Trump made during a May 2023 CNN town hall, which took place hours after the jury found him liable for sexually abusing the writer. During the town hall, Trump attacked and insulted Carroll as a "whack job," denied he ever met her, and suggested the abuse claim was a "made-up story."
The former president has already suffered some losses even before Tuesday's civil trial began.
As well as the ruling that Trump did defame Carroll with his comments, Judge Kaplan said that the former president's legal team cannot try to argue to the New York jury that Trump did not rape or sexually assault Carroll or that she made up to attack to sell copies of her book, as the arguments are irrelevant to the defamation case.
Kaplan has also denied some pieces of evidence that Trump's legal team wanted to show the jury, including a 2019 interview Carroll gave to CNN's Anderson Cooper in which she claimed some people think "rape is sexy."
"This trial is limited to the issue of damages sustained as a result of the defendant's June 21 and 22, 2019 statements. Those statements already have been determined to have been false, defamatory, and made with constitutional actual malice," Kaplan said.
"The introduction of the Anderson Cooper 360 video needlessly and confusingly would invite the jury to decide this case on the basis of defendant's view that those issues are open to discussion or reconsideration. They are not."
Trump's legal team also failed to block the testimony of Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor who specified in the other civil trial involving Trump and Carroll that the writer is entitled to up to $2.7 million for reputational damage alone after Trump attacked her while denying the assault claims.
Humphreys is set to testify again during the new civil trial and could once more state how much Carroll should be paid in damages from Trump.
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About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more