**Content warning: sexual harassment and abuse**
Update 5/22/23: E. Jean Carroll has filed a request asking a Manhattan judge to increase the recent $5 million in damages awarded to her in her suit against Donald Trump. Carroll won her abuse and defamation suit but still has a separate defamation suit pending. Carroll is now seeking a “very substantial” amount of money in that pending suit after Trump went on television and repeated some of the exact things a jury had just found constituted defamation one day earlier.
Original story below:
In what appeared to be yet another effort to prove to the world that he doesn’t care about women or their lives or whether or not he has sexually assaulted them, Donald Trump appeared on a recent controversial CNN townhall-style program where he insulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll, the woman who just made history by winning a civil battery and defamation suit against him. And what’s to stop Carroll from turning around and suing him again for simply repeating the exact words a jury just found constituted defamation? Nothing. And according to her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, she just might do it.
Speaking on CNN on May 10, just one day after a jury sided with Carroll, finding that Trump should pay her $2 million dollars for sexually abusing her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s, plus another $3 million for his subsequent ruthless defamation of her character after she came forward, Trump doubled down on his original insults and demeaning claims about Carroll.
Trump claimed to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he had never “seen” nor “met” Carroll, which has been proven false in court by both witnesses and photographic evidence. “I have no idea who the hell [she is],” Trump said, calling her claims “fake” and a “made-up story,” adding for bad measure: “She’s a whack job.” He then appeared to intimate that Carroll might have been at fault (despite his claims of never having met her), saying, “What kinda woman meets somebody and brings them up, and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?”
Speaking to Rachel Maddow on Monday, Kaplan said Trump is “not going to get away with it another time,” referring to her belief that he was just found liable for those making those exact statements, so he will not be permitted by the courts to keep making them with no consequences.
“It’s unprecedented for a person to have been held liable in defamation to keep doing the defamation, so there are not a lot of cases that we can look to for a playbook about how to do it,” Kaplan explained.
Kaplan hinted that another suit seeking damages is likely to proceed, saying, “We don’t even need a finding of liability, because we already have it.”
(via Huffington Post, featured image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
