Judge to Allow Trump’s New Comments in Carroll Defamation Suit

A Manhattan judge on Tuesday granted E. Jean Carroll’s request to revise a defamation lawsuit she has filed against former President Donald J. Trump, stemming from derogatory comments he made about her in 2019, to include similar comments he made recently on CNN.

The order by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court came over Mr. Trump’s objections. He had asked the judge to stop Ms. Carroll’s defamation lawsuit since, he said, he could not have defamed her in 2019 when he denied her allegation of a decades-old rape. That’s because, Mr. Trump said, a jury in a separate case recently found him liable only for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll, and not for raping her, as she had long insisted.

Mr. Trump’s CNN diatribe against Ms. Carroll, 79, followed a civil jury’s verdict last month finding Mr. Trump, 76, liable in the separate case for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in the mid-1990s. It also found that he defamed her last year when he went on his Truth Social website and called her case a “complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” The jury, after a two-week trial, awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.

Mr. Trump, in response to questions from the CNN moderator, called Ms. Carroll a “wack job,” said that her claim of a decades-old assault was “fake” and a “made-up story” and that her civil trial was “a rigged deal.”

Ms. Carroll’s revised lawsuit seeks at least $10 million in compensatory damages for Mr. Trump’s statements in 2019, after Ms. Carroll first went public with her rape accusation. At the time, he called her allegation “totally false” and said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.”

The revised lawsuit, citing Mr. Trump’s CNN comments, says his post-verdict conduct also “supports a very substantial punitive damages award” in her favor, “to deter him from engaging in further defamation.”

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said on Tuesday, “We look forward to moving ahead expeditiously on E. Jean Carroll’s remaining claims.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said, “We maintain that she should not be permitted to retroactively change her legal theory, at the 11th hour, to avoid the consequences of an adverse finding against her.”