Third Lawsuit Coming? E. Jean Carroll’s Lawyer Says They ‘Continue to Monitor’ Every Statement Trump Says About Her

zz/Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx; AP Photo/Artie Walker Jr.

A normal person might consider keeping his mouth shut the week after he’d had to put up a $91.6 million bond as he appealed a massive defamation verdict against him, but nothing about former President Donald Trump has ever been normal — and his propensity for verbally lashing out at his foes may very well invite another lawsuit against him.

In January, a New York jury issued a $83.3 million verdict against Trump for defaming E. Jean Carroll, which included $65 million in punitive damages. That was after a May 2023 trial where another jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and awarded $5 million in damages.

The cases arose from Carroll’s allegations in a 2019 article that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump vociferously denied the accusations and launched a series of attacks on Carroll, all leading to her suing him for defamation and a separate civil claim for the alleged rape. The ex-president’s deposition included several shocking moments, including one where Trump — who had been adamant that Carroll was “not my type” — mistook a photo of her for his second wife, Marla Maples.

The only matter at issue in the second trial was the amount of damages, and Carroll’s legal team emphasized how Trump had continued to attack their client in the aftermath of the first verdict — including aggressively bashing her throughout the trial.

Trump briefly took the stand in his defense, after getting scolded by the judge for speaking over his own attorneys and disrupting the courtroom. The judge ended up striking most of Trump’s comments from the record because they violated his ruling to not attempt to re-litigate the previous trial’s verdict.

Trump caused a scene again when he stomped out of the courtroom during the closing arguments by Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, as she urged the jury to issue a verdict of at least $24 million in compensatory damages in order to compensate Carroll for the reputational harm Trump caused, and “unusually high punitive damages” to stop Trump from continuing to defame and attack her.

Last week, Trump posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the Carroll verdicts, an amount that is higher than the amount of the verdicts because of the New York District Court’s requirement for parties to post bonds of 110%. Trump will also soon have to put up an even more massive bond as he appeals the judgment in his New York fraud case.

It seems that a cumulative total of $88.3 million in verdicts against him is not enough to get Trump to hold his tongue, as he’s continued to lash out against Carroll and the judgments. At a campaign rally in Georgia this weekend, the presumptive GOP nominee raged about having to post “a $91 million bond, 91 million, on a fake story” that was “based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about.”

Monday morning, Trump again attacked Carroll on CNBC’s Squawk Box, trashing her as “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, a person I’d never met” who was making a “false accusation” against him — similar wording to his insults that sparked her lawsuits in the first place.

Carroll’s attorney Kaplan reacted to Trump’s comments about her client, issuing a statement that made it clear the legal team was considering going a third round with the ex-president.

“The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years,” said Kaplan. “As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll.”