A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims he had raped her decades earlier.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, as part of that ruling granting Carroll a partial summary judgment, said the upcoming trial for her civil lawsuit against Trump will only deal with the question of how much the former president should pay her in monetary damages.
The decision in U.S. District Court in Manhattan is the latest big loss for Trump in suits filed by Carroll.
In May, a jury in the same court for a related lawsuit found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll during an encounter in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and had defamed her last fall in comments again denying her allegations. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages in that case.
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