In addition to the criminal cases against him in New York, Georgia, and on the federal level, former President Donald Trump faces civil litigation from writer E. Jean Carroll. The case seeks civil damages from the former president. She claims Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and defamed her while he was president. Two civil trials await Trump.
Trump claimed in 2019 in response to reporter questions that Carroll was working with Democrats to spread false accusations about him.
Trump Uses Delay Tactic
The rape defamation case that was supposed to have gone to trial dealing with the rape allegation and was supposed to have started on April 10 has been put on hold indefinitely.
Trump Defames Carroll
Trump denies the allegation, saying Carroll was not “his type.” He also has claimed not to know Carroll and has called her credibility into question, saying she doesn’t know “what day, what month, or what year, what decade” the incident took place.
The second trial libel connected with a Trump post about her on TruthSocial from last October will begin on April 25 in New York.
“E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance,” Trump wrote in an Oct. 22, 2022 post on Truth Social. “Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to ‘Trump’!”
Trump Creates Problems
The president’s call for protests against his then-pending indictment last month prompted U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to impose a seal of secrecy around the juror pool that will adjudicate the civil trial. Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, imposed a block on the names and addresses of the jurors of his own volition.
Neither Trump nor Carroll requested the secrecy.
“Mr. Trump’s quite recent reaction to what he perceived as an imminent threat of indictment by a grand jury sitting virtually next door to this Court was to encourage ‘protest’ and to urge people to ‘take our country back,’” Kaplan wrote. “That reaction reportedly has been perceived by some as incitement to violence. And it bears mention that Mr. Trump repeatedly has attacked courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters.”
Kaplan rejected a bid to combine two trials against Trump into a single trial.
“It is a Hoax and a lie, just like all the other Hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years. And, while I am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type!” Trump wrote in 2022 on TruthSocial.
Trump and the Justice Department contend the suits should be dismissed because the government cannot be sued for defamation and Trump’s claims about her were made at the White House while he was president and in comments to reporters. They suggest that the Justice Department should be substituted as the defendant.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is reviewing whether Trump was acting within the scope of his status as a federal employee at the time.
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.
