Donald Trump dismissed from his defamation action against a woman who accuses him of rape

2023-08-07 21:57:44

A federal judge in New York on Monday dismissed a lawsuit by Donald Trump who considers himself defamed by a former newspaper columnist who for years has accused the former US president of raping her in 1996. Trump, 77, who hopes to win back the White House in 2024, had been found responsible on May 9 by the jury of a civil court in New York for the “sexual assault”, not the “rape”, more than 27 years ago of author E. Jean Carroll, to whom he must pay five million dollars in damages.

This 79-year-old woman had filed a new defamation complaint two weeks after the trial for remarks that Trump had made on CNN the day after the verdict: “She is crazy”, had launched the favorite for the Republican presidential primary in November 2024. It is within the framework of this new step of Carroll that Trump brought counter-arguments to a story according to him “made up from scratch”, calling for a new civil lawsuit.

Also on CNN in May, the magazine’s former columnist Elle had notably affirmed “Oh yes he did it, he did it”, after the jury found that she had been the victim of a “sexual assault” but not of a “rape”.

“True on the bottom”

However, according to an order Monday from Manhattan federal civil court judge Lewis Kaplan, Carroll’s accusations that Trump raped her in a dressing room in the lingerie department of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in the spring of 1996 , are “substantially true”. The jury, on May 9, had recognized that Donald Trump had, on that day in 1996, penetrated him with a finger but not with his penis, a crime which would have constituted rape under the law in New York.

But for Judge Kaplan, “in fact, these two acts do constitute ”rape” in common parlance, according to the definition of certain dictionaries, in federal and other state criminal law ” American and abroad . Carroll’s new complaint at the end of May had been paid as part of the first civil lawsuits brought in November 2019, again for defamation, against the former president.

This 2019 action had been delayed by procedural battles, including whether Donald Trump enjoyed presidential immunity in 2019, while he was in the White House (2017-2021).