NEW YORK — E. Jean Carroll – the advice columnist who was awarded $5 million in damages at a civil sexual assault trial against former president Donald Trump in May – won the majority of a related defamation case in a summary judgment decision handed down Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that the May verdict clearly proved disparaging comments Trump made about Carroll in 2019 were false. Those comments do not need to be aired again to prove liability to jurors in a civil defamation trial scheduled for January, Kaplan said.

E. Jean Carroll at her home in Warwick, N.Y. Photo by Eva Deitch for The Washington Post

Instead, the jury will hear testimony about whether Trump should pay Carroll damages for defaming her – and decide how much, if any, to award.

The decision is yet another legal blow for the ex-president, who is seeking a second term in office in 2024 and is separately facing four criminal indictments and an upcoming civil trial on allegedly fraudulent business practices at his namesake company, Trump Organization.

Kaplan’s ruling sharply limits the scope of what will be heard by a jury and does not give Trump’s attorneys room to re-examine Carroll’s core allegations: that Trump defamed her during his presidency after she publicly accused him of raping her decades earlier. Nor will the alleged encounter itself – which Trump adamantly denies – be explored in testimony.

The trial will probably be brief, with only a few witnesses called.

Asked for comment on Kaplan’s ruling Wednesday, Trump attorney Alina Habba said she was confident that May verdict “will be overturned on appeal, which will render this decision moot.”

Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, said her team is looking forward to the trial in January.

Carroll testified in the trial this spring that she was raped in 1996 inside a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store after a chance encounter with Trump. Both were public figures at the time – she had an advice program on local TV, and he was a real estate bigwig and well-known figure in New York society circles.

Judge Kaplan ruled that one of the comments made by Trump can be discussed at the trial. In that comment, Trump allegedly disparaged Carroll by suggesting she could not have been raped because she was too unattractive for him to be romantically interested.

Trump did not take the stand at his civil trial this year, but his attorneys argued that Carroll’s story was a work of fiction. The jury in that case found him liable for sexual abuse, not rape, although Carroll described a rape in her testimony.

The case scheduled for trial in January was filed three years before the lawsuit that went to trial this spring. It focuses only on defamation, not the alleged rape, because it was filed before the passage last year of a New York law that allows people to sue over long-ago sexual assault allegations.

The 2019 case has been winding through the courts for years, as judges considered whether Trump could be sued over speech that he made while president of the United States.

At the trial, jurors will be allowed to also consider Trump’s comments at a CNN town hall on May 11, two days after the jury in the first case found him liable for sexual assaulting and defaming Carroll.

At the town hall, Trump repeated earlier assertions that Carroll was mentally unstable and making the story up.

In addition to the January civil defamation trial, Trump is scheduled for trial in Washington in early March on criminal charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and separately scheduled for trial in New York in late March on state charges of business fraud connected to hush money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He is also scheduled for trial in Florida in late May on federal charges of improperly retaining classified documents after leaving office, and obstructing government attempts to retrieve the material.

In addition, he and two of his adult children are scheduled for a civil trial in October over allegedly fraudulent business practices at Trump Organization.