Donald Trump Could Be Sued a Third Time by E. Jean Carroll

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer has warned that they could sue Donald Trump a third time, because apparently owing $88.3 million isn’t enough for the former president.

Trump owes Carroll the massive amount for sexually abusing her in the mid-1990s and then defaming her twice when denying the assault. Trump is apparently unable to accept his fate, most recently insisting at a rally on Saturday that he doesn’t know who Carroll is.

When asked Monday night about his comments, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley appeared to hint that a third lawsuit was possible.

“We’re watching, we’re listening,” she told MSNBC. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”

Carroll revealed in her 2019 memoir that Trump raped her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She subsequently sued him twice: The first lawsuit was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in 2022. Last spring, a jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

The second lawsuit, which went to trial in January, was over Trump’s allegations in 2019 that Carroll had made up the rape allegation to promote her book. And then, hours after he was found liable for sexual abuse, he went on CNN and repeated comments about Carroll that had just been deemed defamatory. The jury in that case awarded Carroll a total of $83.3 million in damages.

Trump has said he will appeal the rulings, and his lawyers have launched a desperate and so far unsuccessful bid to have the cases thrown out. But more than anything, Trump appears hell-bent on getting Carroll to sue him a third time for the exact same thing. Just minutes after the most recent verdict was handed down, Trump continued to share negative posts about Carroll on Truth Social.

The widow of Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, on Tuesday was temporarily banned from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for reasons still not clear.

On Monday, Yulia Navalnaya shared a powerful, nine-minute video accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing her husband and of hiding the body in an effort to wait for the poison to disappear. Navalnaya pledged to continue her husband’s fight.

“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of” poison to disappear, Navalnaya said, according to a translation by SkyNews.

But less than 24 hours later, she was booted off the platform. X did not cite a reason for her dismissal other than “violating the X rules,” though her dismissal came after the company’s private owner, Elon Musk, spent a year aggressively insisting the platform be a bastion of free speech, to the point of allowing white supremacists and antisemites to run freely.

By Tuesday morning, and after pressure from her political allies, Navalnaya was back online.

Navalnaya has long skirted the political spotlight that came with being the family of one of Putin’s greatest dissidents, but her husband’s death four days ago inside the country’s notoriously brutal Arctic Polar Wolf penal colony has suddenly rocked that reality. In a video posted to the platform, Navalnaya urged other Russians to join her and continue to fight back against the Russian government.

“In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said. “But I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”

“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny.”

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Putin, called Navalnaya’s accusations “unfounded” and “insolent.”

Gun control advocate David Hogg has found a clever way to capitalize on Donald Trump’s newly launched sneakers.

Trump unveiled the garish kicks, which his fans can find at GetTrumpSneakers.com, on Saturday at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. If the website name seems a bit awkward, it may be because Hogg quickly snapped up the more obvious choice: ShopTrumpSneakers.com.

Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting and a co-founder of the gun control advocacy group March for Our Lives, announced his purchase on Saturday. The URL leads to a page called The Shotline, which Hogg explained allows people to send an automated call to their member of Congress urging gun law reform.

“The twist is the person who makes the call is a victim of gun violence,” Hogg said. The website uses A.I. technology to recreate the victims’ voices for the automated call.

As of Tuesday, almost 72,000 calls have been sent through The Shotline.

“Thank you to team trump for being dumb enough to not pay the $12 for the website,” Hogg tweeted Monday night, celebrating his website’s success. “I’ll give it to you for a small donation of $1 million to March For Our Lives.”

Trump launched his sneaker line the day after he was hit with a $354 million ruling for committing real estate–related financial fraud in New York state. Before he can appeal the ruling, Trump would first have to pay the entire amount plus interest, which could add as much as an additional $100 million.

Not to mention the fact that Trump owes $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation, $400,000 to The New York Times, and thousands of dollars in other legal fees and fines. That’s a lot of sneakers.

Trump has positioned himself as staunchly anti–gun control. Just two weeks ago, he spoke at an event organized by the National Rifle Association. The NRA was a major supporter of Trump during his first term, and the group appears ready for a second act.

The former president swore that if he is elected, he will immediately undo all of the Biden administration’s gun regulations.

“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump told the crowd, promising that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin has admitted that he was a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election—but that he only did so out of fear of retribution by the former president and his sycophantic followers.

Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, was one of several fake electors for Trump out of Wisconsin—one of the only states that hasn’t charged people who participated in the illegal scheme to misrepresent the popular vote. But on Sunday, Hitt claimed he was “tricked” into signing documents claiming Trump had won the state in the general election and that the campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 absentee ballots—which Hitt described as his preferred method of voting—“wasn’t something that [he] was comfortable with,” according to an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

Days before Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Hitt says he received a “suspicious” call from the Republican National Committee asking for a “list of the Wisconsin Republican electors.”

“I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud,” Hitt told Anderson Cooper, adding that he was very involved in the election and did not believe there to be any fraud.

The new plan was in: Under the eye of Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro (whom special counsel Jack Smith has dubbed the “architect” of the fake elector scheme), Hitt and other electors from the state were expected to meet at noon at the Wisconsin Capitol on December 14 to sign a document that would insist Trump won—on the basis that the documents would only be used in a contingency in the event that the Trump campaign’s legal case succeeded.

“If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he continued. “It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.”

But that same day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the Trump campaign suit. So why did Hitt go forward with signing the documents?

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” Hitt said, pondering his fate if the Supreme Court ultimately chose to throw out the votes.

When Cooper asked if he feared for his safety from other Trump supporters, Hitt responded that it was “not a safe time.”

“If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death,” he said.

The Republican-controlled West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that could see librarians facing jail time.

House Bill 4654 passed the chamber Friday by a vote of 85–12, along party lines. The bill would remove criminal exemptions for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, even if the minor’s parent or guardian is present. Any employees of those institutions found guilty of giving minors obscene matter can face fines of up to $25,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The incredibly short piece of legislation gives no indication of how the new rules would affect paintings or sculptures that feature nude figures, or books that include descriptions or definitions of sexual conduct. Obscenity laws are incredibly hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation.

As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law. And since libraries and public schools often operate on very tight budgets, they are unlikely to have the budget to fight a surge in lawsuits.

“It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared.”

“This is a very dangerous bill.”

House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty warned that the legislation could inspire many lawsuits over books that staff members don’t even realize are problematic. “The librarians on staff might not know if a book has obscene matter in it or may or may not have shown it to someone, but because it was in the facility and it was sitting on a shelf, it could still be prosecuted,” he said.

The bill has now been sent to the state Senate, which the GOP also controls (along with the governor’s office).

Republicans across the country have increasingly sought to ban books, claiming they are protecting minors from seeing inappropriately sexual content. But most of the books being pulled from shelves tend to discuss race, gender, and sexuality.

Seemingly innocuous texts have also gotten caught up in the fray. School districts in Florida have pulled the dictionary from library shelves for including definitions of sexual conduct and have drawn over children’s picture books.