“She may not hesitate to sue him again and have another jury impose an even larger punitive damage award.”
Donald Trump is flying increasingly close to the sun when speaking about writer E. Jean Carroll on the campaign trail — and a lawyer for the ex-Elle columnist suggested Monday he could get burned again.
During a Georgia campaign rally over the weekend, the former president repeated claims that Carroll “is not a believable person” and had pushed “false accusations” against him, despite his previous insistences of such resulting in multimillion-dollar judgments against him. The remarks came the day after Trump posted a $91.6 million bond to cover the $83.3 million awarded to Carroll for defamation earlier this year as he appeals the verdict.
“I just posted a $91 million bond, $91 million on a fake story, totally made-up story,” Trump told the crowd in Rome, Georgia, according to NBC News.
“Ninety-one million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of, I know nothing about her,” he continued.
“She wrote a book, she said things,” Trump added. “And when I denied it, I said, ‘It’s so crazy. It’s false.’ I get sued for defamation. That’s where it starts.”
Carroll suing Trump again over his weekend remarks is “quite possible,” Bennett Gershman, a professor of law at Pace University and former New York prosecutor, told Salon.
“Trump’s accusation that Carroll is a liar is clearly defamatory and can result in further, and maybe a much larger monetary punishment against Trump, at least until he decides to end his vicious verbal assault on her,” Gershman said.
Whether that lawsuit materializes depends on whether Carroll has the “fortitude” to endure “another public spectacle” that places her under increased scrutiny, Gershman explained. If the writer feels Trump “has not yet been sufficiently rebuked and punished” by the previous judgments against him — and if Trump continues to malign her — “she may not hesitate to sue him again and have another jury impose an even larger punitive damage award,” he said.
The former president’s Saturday remarks were a repeat of his longtime denial of Carroll’s claims that he raped her in the dressing room of a New York City Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s and then defamed her by dubbing her claims a “hoax” and “con job.
