Former President Donald Trump is seeking a new trial after a New York jury sided with advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a defamation lawsuit and awarded her $83.3 million in damages.
The nine-person jury awarded the damages to Carroll in January after finding Trump defamed her in 2019 over her claims that he raped her decades before in a fitting room while the two were shopping at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. Trump has vehemently denied the allegation.
In court documents filed Tuesday, Trump's legal team said a new trial is warranted because U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, erroneously excluded the former president's testimony from trial and provided flawed jury instructions on the definition of common-law malice.
Trump testified for less than five minutes. After he was asked whether he instructed anyone to hurt Carroll with his statements, he said, "No. I just wanted to defend myself, my family, and frankly, the presidency." But after Carroll's attorney objected, Kaplan struck everything after "no" from the record and told the jury to disregard that part of the testimony.
"The Court's restrictions on President Trump's testimony were erroneous and prejudicial" regarding his mental state when commenting on Carroll's allegations, Trump's legal team wrote. "This Court's erroneous decision to dramatically limit the scope of President Trump's testimony almost certainly influenced the jury's verdict, and thus a new trial is warranted."
Trump's legal team stated that in New York law, a finding of common-law malice requires a showing that malice or ill-will was "the sole and exclusive motivation" for allegedly defamatory statements. But they wrote Kaplan's jury instructions on common-law malice included "if it is made with a deliberate intent to injure or out of hatred, ill will, or spite, or in willful, wanton, or reckless disregard of another's rights."
"This instruction was erroneous, and the error was prejudicial," Trump's attorneys wrote. "By affirmatively instructing the jury that an intention to harm the plaintiff is not required to support a finding of common-law malice, the instruction plainly created an erroneous impression regarding the standard of liability and therefore the error cannot be deemed harmless.
"In fact, taken in conjunction with the extreme restrictions on President Trump's testimony … the error was certainly prejudicial. The jury heard almost no favorable evidence about President Trump's state of mind, and then it was instructed that even a partial motivation of ill will, or even mere recklessness with respect to the plaintiff's well-being, would support a finding of common-law malice."
Trump's attorneys also requested a reduction in the damages awarded to Carroll. They wrote the compensatory damages of $7.3 million for emotional harm "surpasses the permissible bounds for such damages and exceeds comparable awards" in" the Southern District of New York, "warranting a significant reduction" to $125,000. They asked that compensatory damages of $11 million for reputational repair should be set aside because Carroll "did not seek to be compensated for any economic harm flowing from her reputational impairment."
They also requested the $63 million in punitive damages should be reduced because case law in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals requires punitive damages to be a 1-to-1 ration with compensatory damages.
Newsmax reached out to Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, no relation to the judge, for comment.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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