Mother Jones illustration; Edna Leshowitz/ZUMA; Erik S. Lesser/EFE/ZUMA
Whenever Donald Trump speaks, somewhere out there a young lawyer makes partner.
During a campaign rally in Rome, Georgia, last night, the former president once again claimed that E. Jean Carroll had falsely accused him of raping her.
Trump describes E Jean Carroll's claims against him as "false accusations" even after a jury found him liable for sexual assault pic.twitter.com/sChFXKLPYY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 10, 2024
Trump’s comments came days after he had secured a $91.6 million bond to cover the whopping judgement ($83 million plus interest) in Carroll’s recent defamation case while he appeals the decision. A jury previously awarded Carroll $5 million in a 2022 case that found Trump liable for sexually abusing her in the ’90s and later defaming her by claiming she had concocted her allegations.
“Can you believe this,” he said on Saturday. “Sometimes it’s not good to be rich. I just posted a 91 million dollar bond, 91 million, on a fake story, totally made up story. Think of it… Based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of.”
His tirade raised the immediate question of whether Trump—who faces 91 criminal counts, a fraud penalty that will top $450 million, and an array of other legal entanglements—had once again exposed himself to legal jeopardy by making comments similar to those that courts have twice found defamatory.
Last month, one of Carroll’s attorneys raised the possibility of a third suit against Trump after he lashed out about the most recent defamation verdict against him during a rally in Michigan. “We’re watching, we’re listening,” Carroll’s lawyer, Shawn Crowley, told MSNBC. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”
The recent civil judgements against Trump, coupled with other factors, are increasingly placing major financial pressures on his business empire. Yet Trump, as his comments Saturday indicate, doesn’t seem overly concerned by another legal bill.
His rally in Georgia marked the first time Trump had returned to the state since last August, when he surrendered himself in Fulton County on felony charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
