Donald Trump on Monday told a judge that he couldn’t have defamed writer E. Jean Carroll by denying her rape allegation after a jury agreed that he did not rape her. The former president’s legal team argued that a second defamation case brought by Carroll must fail after a jury last month found Trump liable for sexual abuse, but not for rape. Trump’s team made the argument in a filing in a defamation case brought against him in 2019 after the publication of Carroll’s memoir, where she first publicly detailed allegations of Trump attacking her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. The case was originally filed after Trump called the accusation “totally false,” but the lawsuit has been stalled by a series of appeals. Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta A. Kaplan, said in a statement that there was nothing about the recent trial verdict that contradicted her client’s long-standing allegation. “The jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump sexually abused her,” Kaplan said. “As a result, the jury concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when he claimed otherwise.”