E. Jean Carroll's lawyer blasts Trump for treating defamation trial like 'campaign event'
In a court filing that was made public Tuesday, the lawyer for writer E. Jean Carroll said that Donald Trump's claim that he didn't get a fair trial in her defamation civil suit against him is "meritless."
In her filing, attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote that Trump's "great difficulty" in refraining from making defamatory statements about Carroll is so “particularly acute" that the court must reject his request for a new trial, and added that the $83.3 million defamation judgment against the former president was “entirely in support of her case" — and a rejection of Trump's claim that the trial was politically motivated.
“As the Carroll II jury found, those were all lies,” Kaplan wrote, according to Law&Crime. The Carroll II case was an earlier hearing in which a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The later trial involved separate defamatory comments.
Trump is seeking to overturn the verdict along with its judgment on damages that, after interest, now totals $91.63 million. According to Trump’s legal team, he should get a new trial because he was “completely muzzled” by the judge and the jury was given improper instructions.
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As Law&Crime points out, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had ordered Trump not to speak about Carroll’s past relationships, sexual experiences or orientation and he could not debate about whether sexually abused or raped her. "These prohibitions hinged on the fact that he had already been found liable for defamation," Law&Crime's report stated.
Kaplan went on to say that “the jury heard with their own ears and saw with their own eyes exactly how Trump has continued to defame Carroll since the Carroll II verdict and his mid-trial promise to defame her ‘a thousand times.'”
“And the jury watched Trump carry out this promise in real time, treating the courtroom like a campaign event,” Carroll's lawyer wrote.
“Given this pattern of behavior, Carroll understandably had serious concerns that Trump would continue in his attempts to cast into doubt whether he sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and would do so in front of the jury.
"That danger seemed particularly acute if Trump himself elected to testify — since the Carroll II verdict, Trump had repeated his defamatory statements about Carroll in multiple forums and included references to topics that this Court had ruled inadmissible in the upcoming trial.
"And during this intervening period, Trump had also testified in a different lawsuit, where he repeatedly defied the judge’s orders in that case,” Kaplan wrote.