New lawsuit possible, lawyer says, after Trump renews attack on writer who won $83.3 million award

NEW YORK (AP) — An attorney for a longtime advice columnist who won an $83.3 million defamation award against Donald Trump suggested Monday that a new defamation lawsuit was possible against the ex-president after he resumed verbal attacks against her at a weekend rally.

Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represents 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll, noted in a statement that the statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions ranges from one to three years.

“As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.

Her statement came after the Republican front-runner in this year’s presidential race angrily complained during a nearly two-hour speech at a Rome, Georgia, rally on Saturday that he had “just posted” a $91.6 million bond to cover the January verdict by a Manhattan jury while he appeals.

He told the rally that the verdict was “based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of.”

His statements about Carroll were similar to those he made while he was president after Carroll first publicly revealed her claims in a 2019 memoir that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room across the street from Trump Tower in the spring of 1996. At the time, Trump said she was lying to sell her book and damage him politically.

“This woman is not a believable person,” Trump said Saturday. He also denounced the trial judge as a “Democrat Trump-deranged judge” and derided a state judge in a separate case who recently refused to halt collection of a $454 million civil fraud penalty against Trump as “another whacked-out judge.” For over 10 minutes, Trump railed against his civil cases and four criminal cases, saying he’d been indicted more often than the “late, great Al Capone.”

Trump, 77, followed up his Saturday rally statements with an interview on Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in which he labeled Carroll as “Miss Bergdorf Goodman” and said, “I have no idea who she is.”

The January verdict at a trial that Trump regularly attended and briefly testified at was based on the 2019 comments. The trial judge instructed the jury that it was only to determine what damages, if any, Trump owed as a result of his 2019 statements. They were to accept the findings of the previous jury that last May concluded Trump sexually abused Carroll at the department store but did not rape her according to New York state’s legal definition of rape.

That jury, in awarding Carroll $5 million, also found that Trump defamed her with statements made in October 2022. Trump did not attend the May trial.

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Associated Press Writer Jill Covin in Washington contributed to this story.

Larry Neumeister, The Associated Press