George Conway Reacts to E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump Payout

Lawyer and anti-Donald Trump campaigner George Conway has reacted to the former president being found liable for having defamed writer E. Jean Carroll for a second time, branding him “a deeply morally bereft human being who has no conscience” during an appearance on CNN.

On Friday, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages and compensation in a verdict he condemned as “absolutely ridiculous.” In an earlier case, a jury concluded Trump had sexually abused Carroll in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store during the 1990s, then defamed her when she went public with the allegation. The earlier jury found him liable for $5 million in damages. Newsweek reached out to representatives of Donald Trump for comment by email on Saturday.

On X, formerly Twitter, Conway shared the two-page verdict along with an email he send Carroll in July 2019, putting her in touch with attorney Roberta Kaplan, who later represented her in the case. Conway added: “I’m going to have these framed together.”

Conway was married to Kellyanne Conway, who served for over three years as senior counselor to Trump when he was president. George Conway previously told CNN he had advised Carroll to take legal action when he met her shortly after writing an article that her case was credible.

Conway said: “I ran into Jean Carroll just by happenstance at a cocktail party in Manhattan a few days after writing that piece and she came up to me and introduced herself and thanked me for writing the piece.”

When asked, Conway said he immediately told Carroll that she should sue Trump and promised to put her in touch with Kaplan, which he later did by email.

After Friday’s verdict was announced, Conway used an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to launch a blistering attack on Trump’s character. He said: “He is, as presiding Judge Kaplan in this case said, he’s somebody who can’t control himself.

“And he can’t control himself because he’s a deeply disturbed, a deeply morally bereft human being who has no conscience, has no morality, has no empathy, has no remorse and is sadistic as we saw during the trial and as the jurors saw in the trial right in front of their very eyes.”

Referring to the former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner, Conway added: “This is a sick man. He is a bad man. And what’s most disturbing about this is that so many people make this about politics. They want to support him for whatever reason or because they’ve done it in the past and they pretend that he is not what he is.

“And many of them, I mean some of them are ignoramuses, but many of them in the upper reaches of his political party know better,” Conway added about Trump’s supporters. “They know who he is. They talk about who he is behind closed doors. They know he is an evil man. They know he is a sick man. They talk about his mental deficiencies, his psychological disorders. They talk about what a pathological liar he is and then when someone asks them to go on the record about it, they say ‘no comment, I didn’t see the tweet.'”

Asked by Collins whether the verdict would stop Trump talking about Carroll, Conway replied: “Maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days.”

On Tuesday, Trump secured victory in the Republican Party’s New Hampshire primary ahead of Nikki Haley. He had previously won the Iowa caucus, after which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, formally a chief rival, dropped out of the race and endorsed him.