Trump Deploys His Favorite Legal Weapon Against E. Jean Carroll—Why The Strategy Rarely Succeeds

E. Jean Carroll: Trump filed the countersuit against the author after a jury determined in May that Trump sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s, then defamed her by denying the allegation, awarding her $5 million in damages.

CNN: The ex-president has sued CNN twice: He filed a $475 million defamation lawsuit against the news organization in October, citing its use of the term “Big Lie” to refer to his unfounded claims of fraud during the 2020 election, along with coverage he claims compared him to “a cult leader, a Russian lackey, a dog whistler to white supremacists, and a racist”—the first defamation suit, filed in 2020 by his campaign over an opinion piece suggesting collusion with Russian officials, was dismissed by a judge who said the campaign failed to prove the author engaged in actual malice.

The Washington Post: The paper has also been sued twice for defamation by Trump in recent years: Trump’s social media company filed a $3.8 billion defamation suit against the newspaper in May after it reported a porn-linked entity could “gain a sizable stake” in the company under a pending merger deal, and a judge in February dismissed a second suit filed by the Trump campaign against the paper over two opinion pieces suggesting that Russia aided his 2016 presidential campaign, ruling that Trump’s campaign failed to prove the authors had a reckless disregard for the truth.

The New York Times: Judges have tossed two recent Trump-related lawsuits against the paper—one filed by his campaign in 2020 over an opinion essay that suggested the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian officials to win the 2016 presidential election and a second lawsuit filed in 2021 by Trump himself against the paper, three of its reporters and his niece Mary Trump for publicizing his tax returns, actions a New York federal Judge said were “at the very core of protected first amendment activity.”

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee: In another failed case against his 2016 opponent, the DNC and nearly 50 others, including former FBI director James Comey, Trump claimed in a $72 million suit filed last year that they engaged in a racketeering plot to falsely link his campaign to Russia, but a Florida federal judge dismissed the complaint months later in a scathing rebuke accusing Trump and his lawyers of “seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him.”