Author E. Jean Carroll leaves a Manhattan court house after a jury found former President Donald Trump responsible for sexually abusing her in a Manhattan department store within the 1990’s, Latest York City, May 9, 2023.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
A federal judge Tuesday granted author E. Jean Carroll’s request to amend her original defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump to incorporate comments he made about her in a CNN town hall last month.
The order from Judge Lewis Kaplan in U.S. District Court in Manhattan is a blow to Trump, who had asked the court to disclaim Carroll’s effort to update her lawsuit, which now seeks a minimum of $10 million in damages.
The judge’s decision was made public shortly after Trump pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges during a historic arraignment in Miami.
“We sit up for moving ahead expeditiously on E. Jean Carroll’s remaining claims,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who will not be related to the judge, said in an announcement to CNBC following the most recent order Tuesday afternoon.
Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump, said in an announcement to NBC News, “We maintain that she shouldn’t be permitted to retroactively change her legal theory, on the eleventh hour, to avoid the results of an hostile finding against her.”
Carroll sought to amend her lawsuit shortly after Trump unloaded a barrage of disparaging remarks about her during a live town hall on CNN on May 10.
“What type of a lady meets anyone and brings them up and inside minutes, you are playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, OK?” Trump said during that event. “I swear on my children, which I never do, I do not know who this woman is. This can be a fake story, made-up story.”
That much-criticized town hall got here sooner or later after a jury in a separate civil case found Trump responsible for sexual abuse and defamation against Carroll and ordered him to pay her $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
The author has accused the previous president of raping her in a department store within the mid-Nineties after which defaming her after she got here forward together with her allegations in 2019. She filed a civil defamation lawsuit against him in 2019, after which filed a second civil lawsuit against him in 2022 that also included a charge of battery.
Lower than two weeks after the CNN town hall, Carroll’s lawyers asked Judge Kaplan to let her amend her original civil grievance to incorporate Trump’s most up-to-date comments, arguing that “the facts and circumstances have modified.”
Trump has denied raping Carroll. He has moved to appeal the decision in Carroll’s second case.
