Trump suing his accuser for saying she was raped

NEW YORK (AP):

Former President Donald Trump is trying to turn the tables on the advice columnist who won a $5-million jury award against him in a sexual abuse lawsuit, saying in a counter-suit that she owes him money and a retraction for continuing to insist she was raped, even after a jury declined to agree.

Lawyers for the Republican presidential candidate filed papers late Tuesday saying E. Jean Carroll should pay Trump unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and retract her damaging statements.

The counter-suit comes a month after Carroll’s lawyers filed a rewritten defamation lawsuit seeking at least $10 million more from Trump over comments he made after the jury verdict in May.

The jury concluded after a two-week trial that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996. It also found that he defamed her in comments he made denying the attack last October.

But the jury rejected Carroll’s claim, first made in a 2019 memoir, that Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

At trial, Carroll testified that the rape occurred after a chance encounter with Trump at the midtown store, initially friendly and flirtatious, turned into a violent assault after they teased each other to try on a piece of lingerie.

Trump has consistently denied ever raping Carroll or knowing her. He said the department store encounter never happened.

In a statement in response to Trump’s counterclaim, Carroll attorney Robbie Kaplan said that Trump “again argues, contrary to both logic and fact, that he was exonerated by a jury that found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll by forcibly inserting his fingers into her vagina”.

She said four of five statements cited by the counterclaim were made outside of the one-year statute of limitations when a claim must be made, and predicted that the other will be dismissed by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan.

“Trump’s filing is thus nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability for what a jury has already found to be his defamation of E Jean Carroll. But whether he likes it or not, that accountability is coming very soon,” Kaplan said. Kaplan is not related to the judge.