A judge rejected Donald Trump’s request to bring counterclaims against New York advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who sued the former president for defamation after he denied raping her two decades ago.
In a ruling Friday in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Trump had already delayed the 2019 case multiple times and that his claim against Carroll was a “futile” and “bad faith” attempt to delay it further.
“The defendant’s litigation tactics, whatever their intent, have delayed the case to an extent that readily could have been far less,” Kaplan wrote. “Granting leave to amend without considering the futility of the proposed amendment needlessly would make a regrettable situation worse by opening new avenues for significant further delay.”
The ruling is the latest setback for Trump in the suit, which already survived a motion to dismiss. Carroll is seeking to move quickly to a pretrial exchange of evidence, including a receiving a DNA sample from the former president, who called her a liar in 2019 after she went public with her account of being raped by him in a Manhattan department store dressing room.
“While we are disappointed with the court’s decision today, we eagerly look forward to litigating this action and proving at trial that the plaintiff’s claims have absolutely no basis in law or in fact,” Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer, said in an email.
“My client E. Jean Carroll and I could not agree more” with the judge’s finding, Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, said in email.
Trump had wanted to revise his formal response to the lawsuit to add a claim against Carroll. According to Trump, her suit violates New York’s Anti Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation statute, known as an anti-SLAPP law, which bars the filing of cases intended to chill free speech. Kaplan rejected Trump’s argument that Carroll’s claim was filed “without a substantial basis in fact and law.”
“Assuming that the facts are as plaintiff claims them to be, nothing in the anti-SLAPP law would defeat her complaint,” the judge wrote.
Trump argued a November 2020 amendment to the state law makes the statute applicable to his case, and that the yearlong delay in seeking to add his claim isn’t unusual.
Separately, the U.S. Justice Department is fighting to replace Trump as defendant in the case. If that happens, it would result in the lawsuit being tossed out. The Biden administration argued that Trump is protected from Carroll’s lawsuit because he made the allegedly defamatory statements about her while he was a federal employee.
