Trump’s countersuit is the latest twist in a circuitous, multicourt legal battle over Carroll’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her.
Donald Trump, who was found liable by a civil jury last month for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, filed a countersuit alleging she has defamed the ex-president by continuing to say he raped her in New York in the mid-1990s.
“Oh yes he did, oh yes he did,” Caroll said during a CNN interview on May 10, reiterating her allegation that Trump raped her.
A day earlier, a jury in U.S. District Court Manhattan awarded Carroll $5 million in damages from Trump.
Trump’s new counterclaim hinges on the fact that the jury did not find by a preponderance of the evidence that he raped her, even as it found he sexually abused her during their encounter in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
Due to Carroll’s “repeated falsehoods and defamatory statements,” Trump “has been the subject of significant harm to his reputation,” wrote Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba in the counterclaim filed Tuesday night.
The alleged rape “clearly was not committed, according to the jury verdict,” Habba wrote.
But Carroll’s attorneys said that is not true.
