The jury listens to the final arguments in the case

The sexual harassment and defamation of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll in the era of #MeToo: A Manhattan jury finds Donald J. Trump

A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found former President Donald J. Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages in a widely watched civil trial that sought to apply the accountability of the #MeToo era to a dominant political figure.

Ms.Carroll nodded as the jury said that Mr. Trump was responsible for defamation. After the jury left the courtroom, Ms. Carroll embraced her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan.

More than a dozen women have accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment, but no one has been successful in proving their claims.

The president was sued by Ms. Carroll last year. She testified at trial that he raped her in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in New York in the mid 1990s.

It is impossible to believe the multimillion dollar profit that was told to jurors by Tacopina.

He said even Carroll had testified that it was an “astonishing coincidence” that a Law and Order offshoot aired an episode in 2012 in which a woman is raped in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman.

They wanted to know when the alleged encounter happened because they didn’t have a reliable memory of the specific year or date. That made it impossible for Trump to defend himself, he said.

“He didn’t even bother to show up here in person,” Kaplan said, referring to Trump’s absence from the proceedings in federal court. She told jurors that much of what he did in public statements supports our side of the case.

Carroll said on the stand that he was here because Trump raped him and he said it didn’t happen when he wrote about it. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.”

Leeds’s 81-year affair with Donald Trump and her memoir, What Do We Need Men For? a Modest Proposal, was published in the September 19, 2019 edition

Jessica Leeds, 81, said he grabbed her chest and ran his hand up her skirt on a 1979 airline flight. She claimed that he kissed her at his Florida mansion as she was working on a story for People magazine.

Carroll made her claim public in 2019 when she published her memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. Trump denied the claims multiple times, and claimed that she was making up the story to sell more books. After she went public, she was fired by Elle magazine.

The man who is seeking the sum of damages testified for two days. Her testimony was praised by Kaplan.

She contrasted that testimony with Trump’s deposition, noting that a man who thought she was a second wife misconstrued a picture of her from over three decades ago.

“Carroll, a former cheerleader and Miss Indiana, was exactly Mr. Trump’s type,” Kaplan said. She’s smart. She is funny. She is beautiful. She is brave.

Carroll, a former Saturday Night Live writer, said they took escalators to the store’s desolate sixth floor, where they teased each other about trying on a piece of see-through lingerie.

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“Consider the evidence and pick a number you think is right,” she said. “This lawsuit is not about the money. This lawsuit is about getting her name back.”

The judge and lawyers were allowed to inform the jurors, but they were kept anonymous. The jurors were asked by the judge not to identify themselves for a long time before they were kicked out on Tuesday.

As a civil trial, the burden of proof for the battery claim was lower than in a criminal proceeding. As in a criminal trial, the jurors need only to believe that the evidence was more likely to be true than not, and that’s what Carroll had to prove.

Sexual abuse is defined in New York as being able to have sex with someone without their consent. State law says that rape involves penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening without the consent of the victim.

The jury’s unanimous verdicts came after just under three hours of deliberation in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Trump is free of criminal charges and no prison time as a result of its findings.

But the jury did find he had sexually abused her. Jury members had the option of finding Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse or for forcible touching, which are less serious charges than rape under state law.

Mr. Trump, who is running again for president in 2024, called the trial unfair on social media. He was expected to appear at a televised town hall meeting on CNN on Thursday, his first appearance on the network since the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump faces criminal charges in New York state over hush money payments made to a porn actress, a civil trial in New York that alleges a decades-long pattern of fraud by Trump and his business, the possibility of charges in Georgia and a pair of investigations by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to undo the 2020 election.

Trump believed it was impossible for the former president to receive a fair trial in New York City, where he won 23% of the vote in the 2020 presidential election.

“Give me a date. November of 1995? November 7? April 3 of 1996? Sure. There’s a calendar. There are schedules. There are appointments. We could see where he was,” Tacopina said during closing arguments Monday. “But of course, with no date, no month, no year, can’t present an alibi. Can’t refer to witnesses.

The jury found Trump guilty of battery in the death of a young black man with a knife and raped his daughter at a high school

She became emotional while testifying, her voice shaking. She said she had regrets but that she was happy she was able to get her day in court.

She said that he raped her in the dressing room when he restrained her and forced his fingers inside of her. She said she ran away after kneeing him. She said she told her two friends about the attack. There was no police report that she filed.

In finding Trump liable for battery, the jury awarded Carroll $2 million in compensatory damages, along with $20,000 in punitive damages. The jury awarded her a lot of money for the defamation claim, finding that Trump had acted maliciously out of hatred, ill will, spite or wanton, reckless, or willful disregard of the rights of another.

“Anything from a gentle but unwanted peck on the cheek to stabbing somebody with a knife could be battery for purposes of a civil case like this one,” U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told jurors at the start of the trial.

After the verdict was read, Carroll left the courthouse accompanied by her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who said, “We’re very happy.” Carroll did not speak to reporters, but she smiled as she departed.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/09/1174975870/trump-carroll-verdict

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She filed a second lawsuit in 2022, this time adding a battery claim, after the state of New York temporarily removed the statute of limitations for sexual assault survivors.

She brought a defamation lawsuit against Trump over his denial. The question of whether Trump could be sued for a statement while he was president has hung up in the federal court.