NEW YORK — A lawyer for a longtime advice columnist who won an $83.3 million defamation award against Donald Trump suggested Monday that a new defamation case was possible against the ex-president after he resumed verbal attacks against her during a weekend meeting.
Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represents 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll, noted in a statement that the statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions ranges from one to three years.
“As we said after the jury’s final verdict, we will continue to monitor any statement Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.
Her statement came after the Republican front-runner in this year’s presidential race angrily complained during a nearly two-hour speech at a rally in Rome, Georgia, on Saturday that he had “just posted a $91.6 million bond” to January verdict to be covered by a Manhattan jury while he appeals.
He told the gathering that the verdict was “based on false accusations about me by a woman I knew nothing about, did not know about, and had never heard of.”
His statements about Carroll were similar to those he made while president after Carroll first publicly revealed her claims in a 2019 memoir that Trump raped her in the spring of 1996 in a locker room at Bergdorf Goodman across the street of Trump Tower. Trump said she lied to sell her book and cause him political damage.
“This woman is not a credible person,” Trump said on Saturday. He also denounced the judge as a “Democrat Trump-crazy judge” and derided a state judge in a separate case who recently refused to halt the collection of a $454 million civil fraud penalty against Trump as “another broken judge.” For more than 10 minutes, Trump denounced his civil cases and four criminal cases, saying he had been indicted more times than the “late, great Al Capone.”
Trump, 77, followed up his statements on Saturday with an interview Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” in which he referred to Carroll as “Miss Bergdorf Goodman” and said, “I have no idea who she is.”
The January verdict at a trial that Trump regularly attended and briefly testified at was based on the 2019 comments. The judge instructed the jury that this was only to determine what damages, if any, Trump was owed as a result of his statements from 2019. They had to accept the findings of the previous jury that concluded last May that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll at the department store, but did not rape her under New York state’s legal definition of rape.
That jury, in awarding Carroll $5 million, also found that Trump defamed her with statements made in October 2022. Trump was not present at the May trial.
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Associated Press writer Jill Covin in Washington contributed to this story.