Donald Trump countersues E Jean Carroll who won $5m case against him

US jury concluded in two-week trial that former president had sexually abused columnist in 1996

Former US president Donald Trump speaks at an event in New Hampshire. AP

Former US president Donald Trump is trying to turn the tables on advice columnist E Jean Carroll, who won a $5 million jury award against him after accusing him of rape.

His countersuit says that she owes him money and a retraction for defaming him by continuing to insist she was sexually assaulted even after a jury declined to find him liable for rape.

Lawyers Alina Habba and Michael T Madaio, representing the Republican candidate for president, filed papers late on Tuesday to say Ms Carroll should pay Mr Trump unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and retract her damaging statements.

The countersuit came two weeks after US District Judge Lewis Kaplan accepted a rewritten defamation lawsuit from Ms Carroll that seeks at least $10 million more in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages for comments Mr Trump made after the jury verdict last month.

The jury concluded after a two-week trial that Mr Trump had sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in spring 1996. It also found that he defamed her in comments he made denying the attack in a statement last October and in a deposition the same month.

But the jury rejected Ms Carroll's claims, first made in a 2019 memoir, that Mr Trump had raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

During the trial, Ms Carroll gave evidence that the rape had occurred after a chance encounter at the store with Mr Trump that was first filled with frivolity and flirtations but turned into a violent assault as they each teased each other to try on a piece of lingerie that Mr Trump was buying for a friend.

Mr Trump did not appear at the trial, but extensive excerpts of his recorded deposition were played for jurors, along with a video revealed shortly before his 2016 election in which he bragged that celebrities can grab women sexually without consent.

He has consistently denied ever raping Ms Carroll or knowing her, saying the department store encounter never happened.

In his countersuit, Mr Trump's lawyers cited comments Ms Carroll made in a CNN interview after May's verdict. During the interview, when she was questioned about the jury's finding that she had not been raped, Ms Carroll responded: “Oh, yes, he did, oh, yes, he did.”

And they said Ms Carroll also revealed that when she spoke to Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina immediately after the verdict, she said she told him emphatically: “He did it and you know it.”

The lawyers wrote that Ms Carroll “made these statements knowing each of them were false or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity”.

“The interview was on television, social media and multiple internet websites, with the intention of broadcasting and circulating these defamatory statements among a significant portion of the public,” they added.

In a statement in response to Mr Trump's counterclaim, Carroll lawyer Robbie Kaplan said that Trump “again argues, contrary to both logic and fact, that he was exonerated by a jury that found that he sexually abused E Jean Carroll”.

She said four of five statements cited by the counterclaim were made outside of the one-year statute of limitations when a claim must be made and that the other will be dismissed by the judge.

“Trump’s filing is thus nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability for what a jury has already found to be his defamation of E Jean Carroll. But whether he likes it or not, that accountability is coming very soon,” said Ms Kaplan, who is not related to the judge in the case.