Conservative attorney George Conway said while it was “bizarre” to be named in author E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against former President Trump, he was “flattered.”
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Conway explained that he met Carroll in 2019, a “week or two” after the excerpt came out in New York Magazine where she detailed her experience with Trump, including allegations of rape in the 1990s.
Conway, the soon-to-be ex-husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post following the claims, urging readers to believe her.
“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,” he said.
According to Conway, she asked him whether she had enough for a case against the former president, and he convinced her to file a defamation suit after Trump denied the allegations. He also helped her to find her lawyer, Robert Kaplan, per the interview.
Trump was found liable for sexual battery and defamation surrounding Carroll in May 2023, when a jury found he sexually abused the author and later defamed her. However, the nine-member jury did not determine that he committed rape.
He was also ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages at the time.
The former president has denied wrongdoing, and Carroll was back in court this week, seeking $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages.
In court this week, the former president’s lawyer Alina Habba questioned that connection between Conway and Carroll. In response, he said “there’s no secret there,” as it has been made public that he advised her in the case.
“It’s also completely irrelevant, but for some reason, Trump and his counsel seem obsessed with that fact, and they brought it up consistently, again and again, in the first trial to the point where the judge had to tell them to stop,” Conway said. “And they’re doing it again this week.”
“I’m kind of flattered by it, but it’s all just kind of bizarre,” he continued.
Conway, who has been a staunch Trump critic, said the defamation case is “something of a microcosm” of Trump and his “tendency to lie and lie again, his tendency to attack.”
Trump claimed to have no idea who Carroll was when she made her allegation. He also argued that he had never met her and that she wasn’t his type.
The former president then went on to confuse a photo of Carroll as his former wife Marla Maples.
Trump made a point of showing up to the trial, which he has not done before. However, during the proceeding, he was accused of being disruptive and the federal judge threatened to have him removed.