George Conway Argues E. Jean Carroll Can Now Sue Trump Again For Defaming Her Live on CNBC

Photo by: Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx

Former President Donald Trump seems determined to dig the $88.3 million hole of the judgments he owes E. Jean Carroll even deeper, by continuing to publicly attack her.  One of those recent attacks opens him up to a specific legal vulnerability, as attorney and staunch Trump critic George Conway pointed out.

Last week, Trump posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the Carroll verdicts ($83.3 million from a January 2024 jury verdict and $5 million for one in May 2023), an amount that is higher than the amount of the verdicts because of the New York District Court’s requirement for parties to post bonds of 110%. Trump will also soon have to put up an even more massive bond as he appeals the judgment of nearly half a billion dollars (after accumulating interest) in his New York fraud case.

The cases arose from Carroll’s allegations in a 2019 article that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump vociferously denied the accusations and launched a series of attacks on Carroll, all leading to her suing him for defamation and a separate civil claim for the alleged rape. The ex-president’s deposition included several shocking moments, including one where Trump — who had been adamant that Carroll was “not my type” — mistook a photo of her for his second wife, Marla Maples.

Throughout both trials, Trump continued to trash Carroll in posts on his Truth Social account and in interviews and comments at his campaign rallies. The two jury verdicts so far have been ineffective in convincing him to hold his tongue, as he obsessively lashes out against Carroll and the judgments.

At a campaign rally in Georgia this weekend, the presumptive GOP nominee raged about having to post “a $91 million bond, 91 million, on a fake story” that was “based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about.” Then on Monday morning, Trump again attacked Carroll on CNBC’s Squawk Box, trashing her as “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, a person I’d never met” who was making a “false accusation” against him — similar wording to his insults that sparked her lawsuits in the first place.

Roberta Kaplan, one of Carroll’s attorneys, reacted to Trump’s comments by issuing a statement that made it clear the legal team was considering going a third round with the ex-president and “continue to monitor” everything he says about their client.

Conway, who personally encouraged Carroll to sue Trump when he chatted with her at a cocktail party several years ago, reacted to the former president’s CNBC appearance and opined about what legal risks he incurred with his repeated insults of her.

In a post on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, Conway called the fact Trump’s attacks on Carroll happened on CNBC “highly significant for a procedural reason in addition to a substantive one.”

If Carroll sued Trump for his comments at the Georgia campaign rally, wrote Conway, “she probably would have had to sue in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia,” because of federal civil procedural rules generally setting venue for a lawsuit in the forum where the events giving rise to the claims allegedly took place.

“But now that he libeled her on Squawk Box, which is anchored in Manhattan, she likely may now sue in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,” Conway continued, which meant that “the case would be assigned to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan as a case related to the earlier two cases that produced $88.3 million in damages awards.”

Judge Kaplan (no relation to Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan) was a frequent target of Trump’s ire during the defamation trials, in no small part because of his ruling that the verdict in the first trial would be binding in the second, barring Trump and his legal team from arguing that Trump did not rape or assault Carroll. Judge Kaplan repeatedly clashed with Trump’s attorney Alina Habba, admonishing her for attempting to re-litigate that issue.

Considering the fact that any potential third Carroll lawsuit against Trump would center on her arguments that his CNBC comments were defaming her about the same exact incident that sparked the first two lawsuits — and using substantially identical language to boot! — and Judge Kaplan had previously ruled Trump was barred from claiming he did not rape or assault Carroll, it appears all but guaranteed the judge would apply a similar restriction to Trump’s defense if they get a third round in court.

Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss” pursued a similar legal strategy after they won a $148 million judgment against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for his defamatory accusations they had participated in fraud in the 2020 election. Like Trump, Giuliani was defiant, constantly attacking Freeman and Moss throughout the trial, insisting he had “told the truth,” and expressing no remorse about how they were targeted by Trump supporters with devastating harassment, racist attacks, and threats.

A few days after a jury awarded Freeman and Moss $148 million — including $75 million in punitive damages — they filed a second lawsuit against Giuliani for “persisting in his defamatory campaign” against them. The 10-page complaint, which you can read here, alleges that the man once revered as America’s Mayor “has engaged in, and is engaging in, a continuing course of repetitive false speech and harassment—specifically, repeating over and over the same lies that Plaintiffs engaged in election fraud during their service as election workers during the 2020 presidential election.”