The Manhattan jury that heard evidence in journalist E. Jean Carroll’s federal lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of rape found the former president liable for battery and defamation on Tuesday afternoon.
It took the jury, composed of six men and three women, barely five hours to reach the verdict. The panel ordered Trump to pay Carroll, 79, $5 million in combined damages.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan instructed the jurors to determine whether there was more than a 50 percent chance that Trump did in fact assault Carroll nearly 30 years ago in the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman. The jury found that Trump most likely sexually assaulted Carroll, but rejected the allegation that he raped her. They further found that Trump then defamed Carroll in an October 2022 Truth Social post in which he called the allegation “a hoax.”
“I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. This verdict is a disgrace — a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!” the former president wrote on his social-media platform, Truth Social, minutes after the verdict was publicized.
Trump’s team has insisted that an appeal will be filed shortly and sought to cast blame on Democrats for corrupting the justice system.
“In jurisdictions wholly controlled by the Democratic Party our nation’s justice system is now compromised by extremist left-wing politics. We have allowed false and totally made-up claims from troubled individuals to interfere with our elections, doing great damage,” Trump’s campaign team wrote.
The jurors heard from eleven witnesses over the course of the eight-day trial but did not hear from Trump, who chose not to attend the trial.
Trump’s lead counsel, Joe Tacopina had sought to undermine Carroll’s credibility throughout the trial pointing to her flip-flopping on the exact date of the incident. While, initially, Carroll insisted that she could not remember what day of the week the assault occurred on, she later testified that it had occurred on a Thursday.
“Now she claims she didn’t say the day of the week because she wasn’t 100 percent certain,” Tacopina said. “She tailored her testimony right in front of you, right in front of you.”
“We know reality from fiction,” the lawyer told the jury.
Carroll’s legal team used the infamous Access Hollywood tapes, in which Trump can be heard bragging about how sexually aggressive he is with women, as evidence of the real-estate magnate’s unsavory views about women and sex.
“I just start kissing them,” Trumps says at one point during the tape, which was recorded in 2005. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lead counsel, played the recording at least five times throughout the trial, arguing that it represented a roadmap to Trump’s misogynistic tendencies and indifference to sexual assault.
“What is Donald Trump doing here? Telling you in his very own words how he treats women,” Kaplan asked the jury at one point. “It’s his modus operandi, M.O.”
Fellow Carroll attorney, Mike Ferrara, put it more bluntly: “It was a confession.”
Tacopina dismissed the recording as “locker-room talk.”
“It’s crude, it’s rude. I’d knock my boy’s teeth out if he talked like that, honestly,” the lawyer said during the trial. “But that doesn’t make Ms. Carroll’s unbelievable story believable.”
“Two things can be true at the same time: You can think Donald Trump is a rude and crude person and that the story makes no sense,” he said, referring to Carroll’s claim. “Both things can be true.”
Last Friday, the judge released a video deposition of the former president defending his notorious comments, which was aired during the trial.
“Well, I guess if you look over the last million years, that’s been largely true — not always true, but largely true, unfortunately, or fortunately,” Trump said in response to a question about his controversial hot-mic comments.
For the first time, the video deposition of Donald Trump for the civil rape case in New York has been released. It was used as evidence in the trial. pic.twitter.com/RZC4Xd72iZ
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 5, 2023
Despite toying with the idea of returning to the United States to testify before the court, Trump remained in Ireland playing golf in a move that likely gave the former president political coverage to denounce the proceedings as politically biased in the event of a liable verdict.
Carroll’s legal team has made it a point of underscoring Trump’s absence as an indicator of the former president’s guilt.
“He just decided not to be here,” Ferrara told the jury on Monday as part of his closing arguments. “He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll.”
“You should draw the conclusion that that’s because he did it.”