Trump’s lawyers say defamation claim by NY writer must fail because jury agreed he never raped her

A New York writer who won a $5 million jury verdict against ex-President Donald Trump can’t win a pending defamation lawsuit against him because the jury agreed with Trump that he never raped her, his lawyers told a judge Monday.

The lawyers urged Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to reject columnist E. Jean Carroll’s bid to win $10 million or more in a second judgment by rewriting the 4-year-old lawsuit against Trump to conform with the findings of the jury that last month concluded Trump sexually abused Carroll but did not rape her.

The lawsuit was filed after Carroll said in a 2019 memoir for the first time publicly that Trump attacked her in the dressing room of a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

The lawsuit has been stalled because the U.S. Justice Department wants to substitute the United States for Trump as the defendant on the grounds that he was acting in his capacity as a president when he spoke on the issue in response to questions by reporters in 2019.

After the civil jury concluded Trump had sexually abused and defamed Carroll with comments last fall and awarded $5 million in damages, lawyers for Carroll, 79, asked Kaplan to amend the original defamation lawsuit to seek $10 million in compensatory damages and “very substantial” punitive damages.

They also sought to add defamation claims to the original lawsuit, citing comments Trump, 76, made at a CNN town hall shortly after the jury verdict.

Trump’s lawyers wrote that the jury verdict favors Trump’s position in the pending lawsuit that he never defamed Carroll by claiming that he never raped her because the jury rejected the rape claim at trial. Trump, who never attended the trial, is appealing the jury verdict.

Kaplan must decide whether to accept the rewrite of the original defamation claim and Carroll’s assertion that the…