En route to the second defamation trial against E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump’s legal team has begun to evolve their defense strategy. The new approach implies that Carroll, a renowned advice columnist, actually gained from the harmful falsehoods that Trump – then the president – propagated about her.
This concept contradicts the jury’s award of nearly $3 million in damages for defamation alone in the first Carroll trial. Yet given Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision, which formally recognized the previous jury verdict as the law of the case, Trump’s lawyer Michael Madaio has had to devise a fresh course of action. Consequently, in a motion drafted last week, Madaio attempted to introduce fresh evidence asserting that Carroll had lied about her claims.
Next, he desires to introduce proof of Carroll’s attempts to market her book, “What Do We Need Men For: A Modest Proposal,” explicitly focusing on emails where she endeavored to promote her book via various media platforms. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, perceives this move as a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent the court’s prohibition on reintroducing issues settled in the first trial, particularly relating to Carroll’s motive behind making the original allegation.
Carroll aims to exclude these emails as irrelevant to assessing damages, which is the single remaining issue to be presented to the jury. Carroll wishes to set boundaries on the testimony of one of her friends, Carol Martin, whom she informed about the assault following the incident. Interestingly, Martin’s testimony in the first trial acted as a corroborative “outcry witness,” but the assault itself is not contested in this subsequent trial.
Ultimately, Kaplan submitted a memo to the court expressing her client’s concerns in this arena. As this trial is scheduled to commence on Tuesday, Judge Kaplan has mandated that Trump must address Carroll’s motion by 2pm tomorrow.
For more specific details about the case, those interested can examine the details available on Court Listener for both Carroll vs. Trump I and Carroll vs. Trump II.
To read more about this piece, please visit the original article written by Liz Dye for Above the Law.