If Donald Trump was looking for any sort of break in his ongoing legal troubles, the E. Jean Carroll case wasn’t it. The former president’s countersuit against Carrol has been tossed out by a federal judge. Adding insult to injury, the judge also doubled down on the verdict that found Trump liable for sexual assault.
Trump’s legal team attempted to claim that Carroll defamed him with her allegations, but considering a jury already found that it was actually Trump who defamed Carroll by disparaging her assault allegations (and continued to do so after losing in court), the countersuit didn’t stand a chance.
Via NBC News:
U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan noted Monday, the jury did find Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll during an encounter in the dressing room of a New York City department store in the mid-1990s, and the details of that finding show that her having maintained that the former president raped her is “substantially true.”
Kaplan dismissed Trump’s counterclaim, which sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, as well as several of Trump’s defenses against a separate still-pending defamation lawsuit brought by Carroll.
But, wait, there’s more. In a separate filing, Kaplan also signed off on letting Manhattan prosecutors subpoena Trump’s “entire deposition” in the Carroll case and review it while pursuing charges for the former president’s alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
That decision makes Trump’s loss to Carroll even more damaging if it aids prosecutors in nailing the former president for falsifying business records to cover up the alleged affair with Daniels.
(Via NBC News)