The lawsuit was originally filed over comments Trump made about Carroll in 2019, when he was president and she had first publicly accused him of a decades-old sexual assault. The lawsuit has been delayed by appellate litigation having to do with whether Trump is shielded from liability because he was president at the time he made those comments.
In the CNN special this month, Trump — who left office in 2021 and is again seeking the White House — echoed some of his past comments about Carroll, including that he had never met her before, that she was lying and that she was mentally unstable.
At various points, he denied anything transpired with Carroll but also seemed to shame her for the assault she says happened in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room after a chance encounter.
“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes, you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, okay?” Trump said.
CNN has faced criticism for the staging of the town hall, which allowed Trump to offer his own version of news events before a friendly Republican audience.
A day earlier, a Manhattan jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting Carroll decades ago, in the department store, and for defaming her after he left the White House. The jurors awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
“Trump, undeterred by the jury’s verdict, persisted in maliciously defaming Carroll yet again” at the CNN town hall, Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote in the revised lawsuit filed on Monday. “Those statements resulted in enthusiastic cheers and applause from the audience on live TV.”
The lawsuit has been locked up in an appeals court fight over whether the Justice Department can take over as counsel for Trump. His lawyers argue that Trump’s 2019 responses to questions from journalists about the allegations were part of his government job. If a court agrees with that stance, it will effectively put an end to the original claims because the government would be immune from liability.
Trump and his attorneys have adamantly denied that he assaulted Carroll. At trial, his attorney Joe Tacopina alleged that Carroll and two of her longtime friends concocted the story because they did not agree with his politics.
The friends — Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach — told jurors that Carroll confided in them about being raped by Trump shortly after the assault allegedly happened. Both said that they never discussed it again until Carroll — who never filed a police report or tried to press criminal charges — publicly accused Trump in her memoir and an excerpt of her book published in a magazine.
