Donald Trump countersues, seeking to turn tables on woman who accused him of rape

Former President Donald Trump is trying to turn the tables on the advice columnist who won a USD 5 million jury award against him after accusing him of rape, saying in a countersuit that she owes him money and a retraction for defaming him by continuing to insist she was raped even after a jury declined to agree. Attorneys Alina Habba and Michael T. Madaio, representing the Republican candidate for president, filed papers late Tuesday to say writer E. Jean Carroll should pay Trump unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and retract her damaging statements.

The countersuit came two weeks after US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan accepted a rewritten defamation lawsuit from Carroll that seeks at least USD 10 million more in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages for comments Trump made after the jury verdict last month. The jury concluded after a two-week trial that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in spring 1996. It also found that he defamed her in comments he made denying the attack in a statement last October and in a deposition the same month.

But the jury rejected Carroll’s claims, first made in a 2019 memoir, that Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

At trial, Carroll testified that the rape occurred after a chance encounter at the midtown store with Trump filled with frivolity and flirtations turned into a violent

assault.