The ruling should significantly streamline the second trial, set for January, over remarks that Trump made in 2019, after Carroll first publicly claimed that he had sexually attacked her in a dressing room after a chance meeting at a luxury department store in 1996. He denies that anything happened between them.
The first trial, this spring, concerned the sexual assault allegation and whether some of Trump’s comments about her in 2022 were defamatory. Jurors awarded Carroll $5 million, finding that she was sexually abused but not that she was raped.
“The jury considered and decided issues that are common to both cases — including whether Mr. Trump falsely accused Ms. Carroll of fabricating her sexual assault charge and, if that were so, that he did it with knowledge that this accusation was false” or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in Wednesday’s decision.
Kaplan wrote that the “substantive content” of the 2019 and 2022 statements was the same. And when the jury found that Trump had indeed sexually abused Carroll, it effectively established that his 2019 statements also were false and defamatory, the judge said.
Carroll and her attorneys “look forward to trial limited to damages for the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made,” said her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba said Wednesday that his legal team is confident that the jury verdict will be overturned, making the judge’s new decision moot.
Trump, the early front-runner in polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is seeking to put the second trial on hold while waiting for an appeals court to decide whether he’s legally shielded from the case. He claims immunity because he was president when he made the 2019 comments.
At least for now, the trial is set to start Jan. 15, the day of the Iowa Republican caucuses.
The Carroll case is part of a lineup of legal woes that Trump is facing as he campaigns to return to the White House.
Four criminal indictments accuse Trump variously of trying to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden; mishandling top-secret documents and trying to conceal that he’d done so; and falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made during his 2016 campaign to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She asserts that they had a sexual encounter, which he denies.
Some of Trump’s criminal trials are scheduled to overlap with the presidential primary season. So is a civil trial in New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James’ lawsuit accusing Trump and his company of defrauding banks, insurers and others by inflating asset values and his net worth. Trump has denied the allegations, boasting that he has “the hottest brand in the world,” and accusing the Democratic attorney general of conducting a political vendetta.
A judge refused on Wednesday to delay that trial, set for next month.
Carroll initially sued Trump in 2019, saying he had smeared her name by saying she’d made a false allegation while “trying to sell a new book” and by suggesting she might be a Democratic operative.
“The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace, and people should pay dearly for such false accusations,” Trump had said. He maintained that he’d never met Carroll, brushing off a 1987 photo of the two and their then-spouses interacting at a social event.
While that case was playing out, Carroll sued again last year under a New York state law that waived a legal time limit for filing sexual assault allegations. That lawsuit — the one that went to trial last year — came to include claims that Trump had defamed Carroll in 2022 by calling the case “a complete con job” and a “scam.” The suit over the 2019 statements remained separate.
Trump, meanwhile, countered with a defamation suit against Carroll for saying, after the verdict, that she was not only sexually abused but raped. The judge dismissed Trump’s suit last month.