Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump addresses supporters as he arrives on stage at a Get Out the Vote Rally on March 2, 2024 in Richmond, Virginia.
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Former President Donald Trump on Saturday stood by his 2019 claim that author E. Jean Carroll made “absolutely false accusations” against him, despite similar claims that resulted in his losing a defamation case in January.
Campaigning at a rally in Rome, Georgia, Trump specified the $91.6 million bond she posted on March 8, three days before her deadline to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for defaming her for statements she made as president after denying her accusation that he raped her in a dressing room department store room in the 1990s.
Carroll first came forward in 2019 with sexual assault claims against Trump before another civil trial in May 2023, in which a New York jury found that the former president sexually abused Carroll but did not she was raped.
“I just posted a $91 million bond, $91 million on a fake story, completely made up story,” Trump said, adding that the conviction was, “based on false accusations made about me of a woman I don’t know, no I don’t know, I haven’t heard, I don’t know anything about her.”
The 77-year-old made similar statements in a June 22, 2019, statement, MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin posted on X on Saturday, along with a document Trump denies knowing “who this woman is.”
“He wrote a book, he said things, and when I denied it, I said, ‘This is crazy, it’s not true,’ he would sue me for defamation,” Trump said Saturday before referring to the New York’s Adult Survivors Actthat removed the state’s one-year statute of limitations, allowing survivors of sexual assault to sue regardless of how long ago the alleged abuse occurred.
“They changed the law that allowed women to come back, like unlimited … then she came back and she said, mid-90s maybe, I have no idea,” she said.
On top of the $83.3 million in damages is a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict Carroll won against Trump last year. In February, the former president was also ordered to pay $464 million on damages for a separate fraud case against Trump and top executives at his company — he plans to appeal all three verdicts.
Trump also shared his concerns about Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who denied his request to delay the defamation judgment, calling him a “Trump-deranged, angry man.”
Both Carroll’s legal team and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
