Carroll v Trump Courtlistener Docs

Source: Court Listener
Type: news-reporting

Source Text

Excerpt only. The source text is too long to reproduce here:

LEWIS A. KAPLAN, District Judge.
The jury in a closely related case tried previously found that Donald Trump forcibly sexually abused plaintiff E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and maliciously defamed her in an October 2022 statement. In this case, another jury awarded Ms. Carroll 17.3 million in compensatory and 65 million in punitive damages against Mr. Trump for defaming her in two other statements that Mr. Trump issued from the White House on June 21 and 22, 2019.1 Mr. Trump now moves for a new trial or, alternatively, for judgment as a matter of law dismissing this case.

New Trial
Mr. Trump’s new trial motion argues that (1) the Court erred in excluding evidence and in instructing the jury on common law malice; (2) the 7.3 million and 11 million compensatory damages awards each were excessive and must be remitted; and (3) the $65 million punitive damages award was excessive and must be remitted. The motion is without merit for the numerous and compelling reasons articulated by Ms. Carroll in her opposition. The Court writes, however, to emphasize four points that perhaps might have been articulated more thoroughly in the briefing.

The Charge on Punitive Damages
Mr. Trump contends that the Court erred by failing to instruct the jury that it could award punitive damages only if it found that Mr. Trump was motivated solely by a desire to injure Ms. Carroll — that is, only if it found that Mr. Trump was motivated solely by common law malice and nothing else. The Court rejects that argument essentially for the reasons stated by Ms. Carroll in her opposition, although it takes this opportunity to develop the point in greater depth.

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and its progeny limited on First Amendment grounds the reach of liability in some categories of defamation cases. Among other things, it required, as prerequisite to liability in some cases, proof of what it referred to as “actual malice.” It held that a defamatory statement is made with “actual malice” when it is made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” In other words, “actual” or “constitutional malice” concerns the defendant’s state of mind with respect to truth or falsity.

New York — the law of which governs in this case — long has employed a different concept known as common law malice. Common law malice exists when a tortfeasor breaches a legal duty to a plaintiff “with deliberate intent to injure or … out of hatred, ill will, or spite or … with wilful, wanton or reckless disregard of another’s rights.” Thus, “common law malice” is concerned with a defendant’s motive vis-a-vis the plaintiff injured by the defendant’s conduct. And proof of “common law malice” long has been both a necessary and a sufficient basis for the recovery of punitive damages in New York tort cases, whether in actions for defamation or for other torts. But it has played another role in defamation cases as well.
“Courts have long recognized that the public interest is served by shielding certain communications, though possibly defamatory, from litigation, rather than risk stifling them altogether. When compelling public policy requires that the speaker be immune from suit, the law affords an absolute privilege, while statements fostering a lesser public interest are only conditionally privileged.

  “One such conditional, or qualified, privilege extends to a ‘communication made by one person to another upon a subject in which both have an interest.’ This ‘common interest’ privilege has been applied, for example, to employees of an organization, members of a faculty tenure committee and constituent physicians of a health insurance plan. The rationale for applying the privilege in these circumstances is that so long as the privilege is not abused, the flow of information between persons sharing a common interest should not be impeded.” 7

The test for whether a conditional privilege in a libel case has been abused long has been whether the defamatory statement was made in whole or in part to serve the public interest that gives rise to the conditional privilege. Thus, the existence of common law malice does not defeat the conditional privilege unless it is the sole motive for the defamation.

This exposition of the relevance of common law malice remains the law of New York today. Indeed, when the New York Court of Appeals first clarified the relationship between actual, or constitutional, malice and common law malice in Prozeralik v. Capital Cities Communications, Inc., it held that proof of actual or constitutional malice alone is insufficient to justify an award of punitive damages. In order to recover punitive damages, it said, a libel plaintiff must prove “common-law malice” — the “malicious, wanton, reckless, or [] willful disregard for another’s rights” — in addition to satisfying any requirement of actual or constitutional malice. Significantly, it said nothing to suggest that a seeker of punitive damages must prove that common law malice was the sole motive for a defendant’s defamation. And since then, the New York Court of Appeals (and the Second Circuit) repeatedly have applied the Prozeralik common law malice test for punitive damages without ever adding a “sole motivation” requirement.

Despite this clear and consistent history, the defendant relies on a 2003 decision by a sharply divided panel of the Appellate Division’s First Department in which that court overturned a punitive damages award in a libel case for lack of any evidence that “malice or ill will was directed specifically at plaintiff.” It then went on, unnecessarily, to assert that the First Department and the Court of Appeals previously had held “that a triable issue of common-law malice is raised only if a reasonable jury could find that the speaker was solely motivated by a desire to injure plaintiff, and that there must be some evidence that the animus was the one and only cause for the publication.” It thus erroneously carried over this “one and only cause” language from the conditional privilege context into the punitive damages context for defamation.

In light of this history, Morsette has no application to the present case for multiple reasons. First, every case cited by Morsette for the proposition that common law malice must be the sole motivation for the defamatory publication to warrant punitive damages in fact stands for the entirely different proposition that common law malice must be the defendant’s sole motivation to overcome an applicable qualified privilege. The Morsette panel, apparently inadvertently (and in any event mistakenly) applied the law applicable to overcoming a conditional privilege defense to the very different question of the availability of punitive damages.

Second, even if Morsette had meant to adopt a new rule applicable to punitive damages — i.e., that common law malice must be the sole motive for the defamatory publication in order to find punitive damages — its comments were dicta. As a simple reading of the opinion reflects, the Appellate Division majority already had overturned the punitive damages award because there was no evidence that the defendant bore any common law malice toward plaintiff. Indeed, the defamation in Morsette arose from the random selection and use of plaintiff’s photograph and its alteration to illustrate a story in a magazine in a way that falsely implied that plaintiff and others depicted had been imprisoned. The plaintiff was simply a random victim, not a target of spite or ill will. Thus, the “sole motive” discussion in the majority opinion was gratuitous.

This Court is mindful that it “is bound to apply the law as interpreted by a state’s intermediate appellate courts unless there is persuasive evidence that the state’s highest court would reach a different conclusion.” Here, the persuasive evidence is that New York’s highest court would reject defendant’s contention that the Court should have instructed the jury that it could award punitive damages only if it found that Mr. Trump was motivated solely by a desire to injure Ms. Carroll — that is, if it found that Mr. Trump was motivated only by common law malice and nothing else. Indeed, the well established case law of New York’s highest court persuasively indicates that it long ago did so in substance.

Events Citing This Source

Event	Date	Category
E. Jean Carroll Sexual Abuse Defamation	May 9, 2023 / Jan 26, 2024	Fraud & Financial Crime

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