Donald Trump can’t seem to stay out of the courtroom. On Tuesday, Trump will again face E. Jean Carroll, the journalist and Elle columnist who previously won a lawsuit against him, and this case stems from similar claims of defamation. This time, though, Trump may be on the hook for an even bigger penalty than the $5 million he was initially slapped with when she won her lawsuit against him last year. In that suit, a jury held that Carroll had been sexually abused by the former president in the mid-1990s, when she says he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department-store dressing room. The jury also held that Trump later defamed her when he accused her of lying and made other colorful claims in the months after she came forward with the accusation.

This month, they’re back at it, in part because Trump still can’t keep his mouth shut. In this upcoming trial, Carroll is seeking additional compensatory and punitive damages for comments Trump made about her in 2019—but the jury will likely also hear about Trump’s more recent repeated defamatory statements. In 2019, he was still president when Carroll published her memoir detailing the dressing room rape allegation, which was prominently excerpted in New York magazine. Trump issued an official statement after the magazine piece published, saying he had never met Carroll; that she was making up “false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves or sell a book or carry out a political agenda”; and asked for information that might tie Carroll or New York magazine to the Democratic Party. In an interview, he then accused her of “totally lying” and insulted her appearance, saying she wasn’t his type. Carroll produced a photo of herself with the president at an event to prove that they had in fact met, which he waved off, saying, “I have no idea who she is.”

In November 2019, Carroll sued for defamation, listing out many of the former president’s comments about her and arguing in her filing that “Each of these statements was false. Each was defamatory.” Trump, the suit now shorthanded as “Carroll I” said, made the claims knowing they were false, and he made them maliciously. Carroll’s reputation was damaged, her work impacted, and her emotional well-being compromised.

This argument was also made in last year’s case, “Carroll II,” in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation for separate but substantively similar statements. In that second case, Carroll sued........

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