In May, the New York case was
decided in favour of Carroll. After that ruling, she and her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, gave interviews. Trump’s counterclaim centered on comments in which Carroll said Trump raped her.
“Oh yes he did, oh yes he did,”
she told CNN.
Carroll also said she had told a Trump lawyer: “He did it and you know it.”
Trump denies assaulting Carroll – whom he called a “whack job” in his own remarks to CNN after the New York verdict, prompting Carroll to
increase her damages claim.
In his counterclaim, Trump said Carroll “made these statements knowing each of them were false or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity”.
Dismissing the counterclaim, Judge Kaplan provided an unsparing analysis of the legal issues that informed the New York verdict. He
wrote: “The only issue on which the jury did not find in Ms Carroll’s favour was whether she proved that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of that term in the New York penal law.
“The jury … was instructed that it could find that Mr Trump ‘raped’ Ms Carroll only if it found that he forcibly penetrated Ms Carroll’s vagina with his penis.
“It could not find that he ‘raped’ her if it determined that Mr Trump forcibly penetrated Ms Carroll’s private sexual parts with his fingers – which commonly is considered ‘rape’ in other contexts – because the New York penal law definition of rape is limited to penile penetration.”
Kaplan had already outlined why it was not defamation for Carroll to say Trump raped her.
“As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”