Roberta Kaplan, the attorney for E. Jean Carroll who successfully sued former President Trump for sexual abuse and defamation, said Thursday “everything’s on the table” after Trump commented on the case in a CNN interview this week.
A jury awarded Carroll $5 million on Tuesday after she testified that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and then defamed her, causing her lasting harm.
She had sued for sexual battery under New York State’s Adult Suvivors Act.
Prior to the trial, Trump had called her allegations “a con job,” a “hoax” and a “lie,” as well as “a complete scam,” which he maintains aren’t defamatory comments and are the truth.
In a CNN town hall Wednesday evening, Trump did not back down, calling Carroll a “wack job” and saying her civil trial was “rigged.”
“This woman, I don’t know her, I never met her, I don’t know who she is,” Trump said,” Trump asserted during the broadcast.
He went on to suggest that it was Carroll who initiated the incident, positing, “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky panky in a dressing room?”
In an interview Thursday with the New York Times, Carroll retorted, “It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people.”
Kaplan said Thursday that a decision would be made soon about whether Carroll’s legal team would file another defamation suit against Trump, stating “Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it.”
Trump is already facing numerous other legal challenges, including 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money paid to at least two women ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. That April 4 hearing took place in a Manhattan court just a few blocks from where Carroll’s lawsuit occurred.
Trump is also the subject of criminal investigations by the state of Georgia and the federal government for his role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House.
