The Justice Department said Tuesday that it would no longer argue that President Donald J. Trump’s derogatory statements about E. Jean Carroll in 2019 were made as part of his official duties as president — a reversal that gives new momentum to her case.
Ms. Carroll, 79, who won $5 million in damages in a trial accusing Mr. Trump of sexual abuse in the 1990s and defamation after he left the White House in January 2021, now is trying to push forward a separate lawsuit over comments that he made while president. That case has been mired in appeals. If a judge ultimately finds that those earlier comments were part of Mr. Trump’s official duties, that case would most likely be dismissed.
The Justice Department had taken the position, first during the Trump administration and later under President Biden, that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity when he called Ms. Carroll a liar and denied her accusation that he had raped her nearly 30 years ago in a Manhattan department store dressing room.
But the department said in a court filing Tuesday that new evidence had surfaced since Mr. Trump, 77, left office — including in the recent civil trial in which a Manhattan jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll decades ago.
The fresh set of facts suggests “that Mr. Trump was motivated by a ‘personal grievance’ stemming from events that occurred many years prior to Mr. Trump’s presidency,” department lawyers said in the filing.
The lawyers noted that Mr. Trump’s 2019 statements about Ms. Carroll were made through official channels that presidents often use to communicate with the news media. But, they said, “Although the statements themselves were made in a work context, the allegations that prompted the statements related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades prior to Mr. Trump’s presidency.”
A lawyer for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said in a statement: “We are grateful that the Department of Justice has reconsidered its position. We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will, and spite, and not as president of the United States.”
Ms. Carroll’s pending defamation lawsuit stems from Mr. Trump’s words in 2019 after she first publicly accused him of pushing her up against a dressing room wall in the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s, pulling down her tights, opening his pants and forcing himself upon her. Ms. Carroll made her accusation in a book excerpt in New York magazine.
Mr. Trump at the time called Ms. Carroll’s accusation “totally false,” said he had never met her and that he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.”
After Ms. Carroll sued, the Justice Department, then led by the attorney general, William P. Barr, intervened under a law that substitutes the government as the defendant when a federal official is sued for official acts, which would lead to the case’s dismissal.
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court, rejected the department’s move, ruling that Mr. Trump’s comments had “no relationship to the official business of the United States.”
A protracted appeal followed, with the case ultimately being returned to Judge Kaplan.
The judge asked the department to weigh in for a second time after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers revised her lawsuit to include yet another round of disparaging remarks that Mr. Trump made, this time on CNN on May 10, one day after the verdict in the trial.
Mr. Trump, in response to questions from the CNN moderator, called Ms. Carroll a “wack job” and said that her assault claim was “fake” and a “made-up story” and that her civil trial was “a rigged deal.”
In their letter Tuesday, the department lawyers said the new evidence they considered in reaching their decision included the recent jury verdict, the new allegations in Ms. Carroll’s revised complaint and a review of a deposition given by Mr. Trump in connection with Ms. Carroll’s case.
“There is no longer a sufficient basis to conclude that the former president was motivated by ‘more than an insignificant’ desire to serve the United States government,” the lawyers wrote.