E. Jean Carroll, center, walks out of Manhattan federal court on May 9, in New York. A jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing the advice columnist in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House. Seth Wenig/Associated Press
A federal judge in New York on Thursday scheduled E. Jean Carroll’s remaining defamation lawsuit against former president Donald Trump for trial in early 2024, writing in a brief order that unless the case has been “entirely disposed of” before then, the trial will begin Jan. 15.
Carroll, an author and advice columnist, won a $5 million verdict against Trump in a sexual assault and defamation lawsuit last month. That case focused on a decades-old assault Carroll says Trump carried out in a department store dressing room, and derogatory comments Trump made about Carroll after leaving the White House.
The former president denies wrongdoing.
Carroll had filed an earlier lawsuit over comments Trump made about her in 2019, when he was president and she had first publicly accused him of the long-ago assault. That suit has been delayed by appellate litigation having to do with whether Trump is shielded from liability because he was president at the time he made those comments.
Attorneys for Carroll amended the lawsuit, however, following new comments Trump made on a CNN special event May 10 – just after the jury’s $5 million verdict in the other complaint.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled Tuesday that he would accept the amended lawsuit. On Thursday, he set the trial date, saying that “Unless this case previously has been entirely disposed of, trial of this action shall commence on Jan. 15, 2024, absent contrary order of the Court.”
Trump is scheduled to face a criminal trial in New York in March on charges of falsification of business records related to hush money payments during the 2016 campaign. He’s been indicted in Miami on federal charges that he broke the law dozens of times by keeping and hiding top-secret documents in his Florida home. And he is under investigation in both Fulton County, Ga., and Washington for efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and activities leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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