A civil jury discovered former President Donald Trump answerable for sexual abuse, battery and defamation of former journal columnist E. Jean Carroll Tuesday, awarding her a complete of $5 million in damages.
A civil jury discovered former President Donald Trump answerable for sexual abuse, battery and defamation of former journal columnist E. Jean Carroll Tuesday, awarding her a complete of $5 million in damages.
It rejected her rape declare.
The jury turned its verdict round mere hours after it was given the case Tuesday morning.
U.S. District Courtroom Decide Lewis Kaplan had stored the jury — comprised of six males and three ladies — nameless all through the trial, citing Trump’s rhetorical assaults associated to his April indictment in New York for hush cash funds to Stormy Daniels.
Carroll, a former journal columnist, accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman division retailer altering room within the mid-Nineties, after which mendacity about it and defaming her afterward.
Carroll’s legal professionals hammered Trump’s monitor file, presenting the jury with all the things from the Entry Hollywood tape, the place he brags about assaulting ladies consequence-free, to the accusations of two different ladies, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who testified that Trump additionally sexually assaulted them in semi-public locations (an airplane and Mar-a-Lago, respectively). In complete, Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by over 20 ladies.
Trump stumbled on this case in ways in which appeared to assist Carroll’s trigger. Whereas he refused to testify in court docket, his video deposition confirmed him mistaking a younger Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples — regardless of his protestations that he wouldn’t rape Carroll as a result of she’s not his “kind.”
Carroll’s lawyer additionally pressed him on the start and finish dates of his varied marriages, none of which he might keep in mind. It was a seeming direct response to the tactic utilized by Trump’s legal professionals (and regularly weaponized in opposition to sexual assault survivors) to shed doubt on Carroll’s account as a result of she couldn’t keep in mind the precise date when it allegedly occurred.
He gave one other placing response throughout his deposition when requested whether or not his Entry Hollywood feedback — about well-known people with the ability to get away with sexual assault — had been true.
“Should you look during the last million years, I assume that’s been largely true,” he replied. “Not at all times, however largely true. Sadly or thankfully.”
Trump’s legal professionals tried to color Carroll as an attention-seeking liar, and to argue that her and her pals’ political opposition to Trump was the actual root of the supposed fabrication. Carroll has mentioned that it was the Me Too motion that prompted her to return ahead. Trump’s staff known as no witnesses.
Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019, after she made her accusations public in an excerpt from her then-upcoming guide. He claimed that he had by no means met her — prompting her to produce an image of the 2 of them conversing in a bunch — and that she fabricated the assault to juice her guide gross sales. That case has since been postponed indefinitely after bouncing across the courts, which struggled to find out if Trump’s feedback, which he made throughout his presidency, got here below the purview of his function as a authorities official.
The case that finally went to trial is a separate one, stemming from a lawsuit Carroll filed in 2022 after New York state handed the Grownup Survivors Act. The legislation supplies a one-year window, expiring this November, for victims of sexual assault to file civil claims associated to episodes past the state’s statute of limitations. Carroll’s second lawsuit made a brand new defamation declare and added a battery declare. She was looking for an unspecified greenback quantity in damages, saying that Trump has broken her repute.