New lawsuit possible, lawyer says, after Trump renews attack on writer who won $83.3 million award

An attorney for a longtime advice columnist who won an $83.3 million defamation award against Donald Trump suggested Monday that a new defamation lawsuit was possible against the ex-president after he resumed verbal attacks against her at a weekend rally.

Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represents 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll, noted in a statement that the statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions ranges from one to three years.

“As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.

Her statement came after the Republican front-runner in this year's presidential race angrily complained during a nearly two-hour speech at a Rome, Georgia, rally on Saturday that he had “just posted” a $91.6 million bond to cover the January verdict by a Manhattan jury while he appeals.

He told the rally that the verdict was “based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn't know, never heard of.”

His statements about Carroll were similar to those he made while he was president after Carroll first publicly revealed her claims in a 2019 memoir that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room across the street from Trump Tower in the spring of 1996. At the time, Trump said she was lying to sell her book and damage him politically.

“This woman is not a believable person,” Trump said Saturday. He also denounced the trial judge as a “Democrat Trump-deranged judge” and derided a state judge in a separate case who recently refused to halt collection of a $454 million civil fraud penalty against Trump as “another whacked-out judge.” For over 10 minutes, Trump railed against his civil