Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to supporters during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024.
Alyssa Pointer | Reuters
Donald Trump on Monday once again denied allegations by E. Jean Carroll that he raped and defamed her, despite facing nearly $90 million in civil penalties for making similar statements about the writer.
Carroll’s attorney quickly responded that they are closely monitoring Trump’s latest remarks about her — and suggested that a third defamation lawsuit could be in store for the former president.
Trump in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” claimed that several civil court judgments against him in New York — two of them in Carroll’s favor — will cause companies to leave the state.
“People aren’t moving into New York, because of the kind of crap they’re pulling on me,” he said.
They’re “the most ridiculous decisions,” Trump said, “including the ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,’ a person I’d never met.”
Carroll has said Trump raped her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
“I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued,” he said in Monday’s interview. “From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.'”
“I got charged, I was given a false accusation and had to post a $91 million bond on a false accusation,” Trump added, referring to the bond he secured in recent days to guarantee a judgment in Carroll’s favor.
The interview echoed remarks Trump made about Carroll over the weekend at a campaign rally in Georgia, where the presumptive Republican presidential nominee accused her of making “false accusations.”
After the CNBC interview aired, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan in a statement obtained by NBC News said, “The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years.”
“As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.
The lawyer George Conway, a harsh critic of Trump who encouraged Carroll to file her first defamation suit against him, in a tweet Monday said the former president had opened himself up to a third lawsuit from the writer.
And since Trump’s remarks were made on the CNBC show, which is anchored in Manhattan, Carroll may be able to sue him in the same New York federal court where she brought her two prior lawsuits, Conway wrote in that post on the social media site X.
“If she does that, the case would be assigned to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan as a case related to the earlier two cases that produced $88.3 million in damages awards,” Conway wrote.
Carroll in a 2019 magazine article first publicly accused Trump of raping her.
She then sued him in Manhattan federal court alleging defamation after the then-president denied the rape claim, and accused her of making up her account because of political animus and a desire to boost sales of her book sales.
Carroll sued Trump in the same court again in late 2022, for battery related to the alleged rape, and for defamation related to new comments he hade made about her.
Trump, who had left White House by then, in those October 2022 comments also called Carroll as “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman.”
A jury last May in the second case awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexual abusing and defaming her.
In January, another jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million for defaming Carroll in the statements he made about her rape claim when he was president.
Trump is appealing the verdicts in both cases.
He has posted bonds and cash totaling $97.2 million to secure the judgments in Carroll’s favor as he appeals them. The money and bond he put up would be returned if he wins his appeals.
Trump separately faces a judgment of $454 million in total damages and interest after losing a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General’s Office accusing him of civil business fraud.
