New York: The Justice Department on Tuesday said that former President of the US Donald Trump can be held personally liable for remarks he made about a woman who accused him of rape. He was protected before because he was the president when he made the remarks.
In a letter filed with the judge presiding over a defamation lawsuit that columnist E. Jean Carroll brought in Manhattan federal court in 2020, the department says it no longer has a sufficient basis to conclude that Trump was motivated in his statements about Carroll's claims by more than an insignificant desire to serve the United States.
Previously, the DOJ had agreed to Trump's attorneys that he was protected from the lawsuit by the Westfall Act, which provides federal employees absolute immunity from lawsuits brought over conduct occurring within the scope of their employment.
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In May, a jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after concluding that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 at a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store and then defamed her last fall with comments he made about her and her claims. While the jury concluded that Trump sexually abused Carroll, it rejected her rape claim.
The trial resulted from a lawsuit that Carroll brought last November after New York state temporarily allowed victims of sexual abuse to make civil claims for attacks that transpired even decades earlier. In the letter from U.S. attorneys, they referred to the jury’s verdict, Trump’s October deposition, and Carroll’s subsequent allegations that Trump re-tarnished her with comments he made at a CNN town hall the day after the verdict.
The letter gives fresh fuel to Carroll's original defamation lawsuit, which had been delayed by appeals over whether Trump could be held liable for statements he made while serving as the president. The original claims are scheduled for trial next January and stem from comments Trump made in 2019 after Carroll publicly claimed for the first time about being sexually attacked by Trump in a memoir.
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Carroll's lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, welcomed the DOJ submission, saying it was one of the last obstacles to the lawsuit reaching trial. "We are grateful that the department has reconsidered its position," she said in a statement. We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will, and spite, and not as President of the United States.
However, lawyers for Trump did not immediately react to the submission by the Department of Justice on Trump. Earlier in the day, Carroll's lawyers filed papers challenging a counterclaim in the defamation lawsuit by Trump's lawyers who maintained that Carroll had defamed him with comments she made after the May verdict in part because she reiterated the statement that Trump raped her.
The lawyers wrote that his counterclaim was nothing more than his latest effort to spin his loss at trial. They said the sexual abuse Trump was found liable for was equivalent to rape under some criminal statutes and would require him to register for the rest of his life as a sex offender if it had been a criminal claim. (AP)
