Trump Never Stopped Harassing E. Jean Carroll
And neither has the DOJ.
In the mid-1990s, Donald Trump sexually assaulted advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. When Carroll went public with her account in 2019, Trump called her a liar, said she was too ugly for him to have assaulted, and accused her of conspiring with evil Democrats to fabricating the story. She sued for defamation and won two jury verdicts totaling $88 million.
In all that time, Trump has never stopped harassing Carroll. And now that he’s back in the White House, he’s enlisted the the Justice Department to help him do it.
Carroll I and Carroll II
Carroll filed her original defamation suit in New York state court in November 2019. Trump spent weeks trying to duck the process server, and when that stopped working, he argued that a sitting president was immune from civil suit entirely. Alternatively, Trump insisted that he was a Florida resident and New York courts had no jurisdiction over him.
By September 2020, Trump had lost those fights and was staring down a court order to submit his DNA for comparison to genetic material on the dress Carroll wore the day of the assault. But then Attorney General Bill Barr swooped in to rescue his boss by substituting the government as a defendant in the case.
The theory was that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he said that Carroll was too unattractive to assault — merely commenting on the news of the day, as a world leader must. Under the Westfall Act, a government stands in as the defendant in a civil suit against a federal employee who commits a tort in the course of his official duties. But you can only sue the government when it specifically waives sovereign immunity, which it hasn’t done for defamation. So, if Barr was successful in turning Carroll v. Trump into Carroll v. US, that would have ended the lawsuit entirely.
The case landed on the docket of Judge Lewis Kaplan, a cantankerous old goat in the Southern District of New York. He rejected the substitution, finding that the Trump had not been doing official president stuff when he defamed Carroll, and thus the government was not the appropriate defendant. Trump appealed, and the case spent the next two years being kicked around the Second Circuit and the DC Court of Appeals to determine whether Trump had been acting within the scope of his duties under DC law when he defamed Carroll back in 2019.
On Thanksgiving 2022, New York’s Adult Survivors Act was enacted, allowing victims of sexual abuse whose claims would be otherwise time-barred to file civil suits. That very day, Carroll filed a second complaint alleging sexual assault and (more) defamation, since Trump had continued to shitpost about her for years. That suit came to be known as Carroll II.
