Jury finds Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll

A jury has found that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. 

The panel of six men and three women also found that Trump injured advice columnist Carroll in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and defamed her when he called her a liar, ordering the former President to pay $5million in damages. 

But they ruled after just three hours of deliberation that the evidence did not show that the former president had raped her. 

Carroll bowed her head as the verdict in the battery allegation was read out. As the defamation verdict was read she bowed it again, nodding in agreement. Afterwards she stood up and shook hands with Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina.

In a fiery post to Trump’s social media app Truth Social he wrote in all caps, ‘I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!’

Carroll left court beaming from ear to ear without making a statement to the media.

Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by more than two dozen women, but this has so far been the only case to end up before a jury.

Carroll, 79, sued for battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a law passed in New York that allowed a one year window for sexual assault claims normally outside of the statute of limitations.

Her claim for defamation was based on statements made by Trump, 76, when he was President and posts to Truth Social, his own social network, in which he called her a liar.

Over two weeks the jury heard emotional testimony from three accusers and two of Carroll’s friends, among other witnesses, while Trump himself was a no show.

 

Trump denies the allegation that he raped Carroll in the mid 1990s. 

There was a last minute hiccup Tuesday before the verdict over a social media post by Trump in which he claimed he wasn’t allowed to ‘defend himself’. Trump was allowed to testify but his lawyers did not file an application by the deadline which was set by the judge at 5pm on Sunday.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote: ‘Waiting for a jury decision on a False Accusation where I, despite being a current political candidate and leading all others in both parties, am not allowed to speak or defend myself.’

He added he would ‘appeal the Unconstitutional silencing of me, as a candidate, no matter the outcome!’

In court Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said it was ‘troublesome’ for Trump to be posting that he wasn’t allowed to testify when in fact he was. She asked Judge Kaplan to tell the jury that Trump did have the opportunity to come to court but he balked.

Judge Kaplan said: ‘We’re dealing here with what we’re dealing with’ and said he wanted to make no further comment.

Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina told the court that there was ‘nothing that would require an instruction’ to the jury in the post.

Carroll was represented by high profile attorney Roberta Kaplan, one of the founders of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which helped represent victims of workplace harassment and came about after the MeToo movement.

She told the jury that she was on her way out of Bergdorf Goodman when she saw Trump coming in. ‘Hey you’re that advice columnist’, he told her. She fired back: ‘Hey you’re that real estate guy’.

At the time Carroll was a media celebrity in her own right thanks to her advice column with Elle magazine, Ask E. Jean, and her cable TV show of the same name.

Trump asked her to help him choose a gift for a girl and after some ‘playful banter’ they went up to the sixth floor to the lingerie department.

As Carroll told it, she thought the whole thing was a ‘fun New York story’, made all the more amusing when Trump told her to try on a see-through bodysuit. She told him to try it on, continuing the banter as he showed her into a changing room.

But then the mood suddenly became ‘dark’, Carroll told the jury.

Trump ‘shut the door and shoved me against the wall,’ Carroll said. She told the court: ‘I pushed him back, and he thrust me back against the wall, banging my head.

‘He put his shoulder against me and held me against the wall’.

Carroll could not see Trump as he penetrated her but she could ‘certainly feel that pain’.

After fighting him off, she ran outside and called a friend, Lisa Birnbach, a journalist, who told her to go to the police.

Carroll also spoke to Carol Martin, the former TV anchor, who told her to keep quiet as Trump would ‘bury her’.

She did exactly that for 20 years until 2019 when he had become President and she wrote a memoir publicly accusing him for the first time.

Carroll claims that Trump set out to ‘destroy’ her, calling her a liar and saying her allegations were a ‘hoax’.

She endured a deluge of hate mail and Tweets and allegedly lost her job with Elle because her readers couldn’t trust her any more.

Under cross examination from Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, Carroll became emotional when asked repeatedly why she didn’t scream.

‘Mr Tacopina,’ Carroll said, ‘I was born in 1943. I am a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught and trained to keep our chins up and to not complain.

‘The fact that I never went to the police is not surprising for someone my age. We were not ever trained to call the police, ever. I would rather have done anything than call the police’.

When Tacopina repeatedly asked why Carroll didn’t scream, she fired back: ‘You can’t beat up on me for not screaming’.

Carroll cried and uttered one of the most memorable lines of the trial: ‘I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not!’

Judge Lewis Kaplan allowed other accusers to give evidence in what Carroll hoped proved a pattern of behavior.

The first Jessica Leeds, who claimed Trump groped her on a plane from Texas to New York in 1979.

They ate their meal and chatted for a bit and then ‘suddenly Trump decided to kiss me and grope me’, Leeds told the jury.

Leeds said: ‘It was like a tussle. His hands – he was trying to kiss me and trying to pull me towards him.

‘He grabbed my breast. It was like he had 40 zillion hands. It was a tussling match between the two of us.

‘When he started putting his hand up my skirt it gave me a gold of strength and I managed to wiggle out of the seat’.

Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist, told the jury how Trump groped and kissed her in a private room of his Florida estate while she was there doing a photoshoot in 2005 to mark the first anniversary of his wedding to wife Melania.

While Melania, who was heavily pregnant with their first son Barron, was getting changed, Trump invited Stoynoff to show her another room at Mar-a-Lago and then allegedly pounced.

Stoynoff said: ‘By the time I turned around he had his hands on my shoulder and was pushing me against the wall and kissing me. I tried to push him away.

‘He came toward me again and I tried to shove him again. He was kissing me. He was against me, just holding my shoulder back’.

A butler interrupted them and they both went back to the photoshoot where Trump resumed being a ‘doting’ husband.

Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley told the jury that in this case there were ‘three women, one clear pattern’.

Trump started with a ‘friendly encounter’ then he would ‘pounce’ and kiss and grope his victims.

If they questioned him Trump would ‘humiliate them. Call them liars. Call them too ugly to assault’, Crowley told the jury.

The jury were also shown the infamous Access Hollywood tape which emerged in 2016 before the election and showed Trump being caught on a hot mic bragging to show host Billy Bush how he liked to ‘grab women by the pu**y’.

None of the panel showed any reaction to the two minute clip.

Trump did not mount a defense as his only witness was unable to testify.

His lead attorney was Tacopina, whose hulking presence in court provided ample fodder for the sketch artists.

In his opening remarks he addressed the elephant in the room and said people had ‘very strong feelings’ about his client.

Tacopina told the jury: ‘It’s okay to feel however you feel. You can hate Donald Trump, it’s OK. But there’s a time and a secret place for that, it’s called the ballot box, not a court of law’.

According to Tacopina, Carroll’s story was ‘unbelievable’ and an ‘affront to justice’.

He said: ‘She’s abusing the system by advancing a false claim of rape for money, political reasons and for status. In doing so she minimizing true rape victims, real rape victims and she’s exploiting their pain and suffering’.

Politics was brought up repeatedly and Carroll and her supporting witnesses were asked about their views, which were overwhelmingly Democratic.

Martin, the friend who Carroll claimed she told about the alleged rape, said in emails read out in court that she ‘hated’ Trump.

After Carroll wrote her book in 2019, Martin attended a party where the attendees including comedian Kathy Griffin, who was canceled after posing with a mocked up severed Donald Trump head.

Martin denied that her feelings towards Trump would cause her to lie in front of the jury.

The trial had begun with a question mark over whether Trump would attend.

During the first week he appeared at a campaign rally in New Hampshire and by the second week his lawyers said he would not be there.

But last Thursday as he flew home from Ireland, where he had been visiting one of his golf courses, Trump said that he wanted to come back to ‘confront’ Carroll.

The judge gave him until 5pm on Sunday to say if he would be attending and the deadline passed with no letter making such a request from his attorneys.

Trump did speak to the jury in a 45-minute deposition played to the court in which he called Carroll ‘mentally sick’ and became visibly irate when being questioned.

The former President reiterated his claims she was ‘not my type’, telling Kaplan: ‘It’s not politically correct to say it. I know that, but I’ll say it anyway’

He later turned on Kaplan and called her a ‘political operative’, adding: ‘You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either’.

But the deposition proved embarrassing for Trump when he wrongly identified a picture of Carroll from the mid 1980s as his second wife, Marla Maples.

‘That’s Marla!’ Trump said as he looked at the image. Kaplan immediately said that he was pointing at a picture of Carroll, the clear implication being she was his type.

Kaplan also asked about the Access Hollywood video which was shot in 2005 as Trump traveled on a bus with Bush. It emerged weeks before the 2016 election, nearly derailing Trump’s bid for the White House.

Asked if he really could grab women ‘by the p***y’ as he claimed in the video, Trump said that was ‘true for the stars’, and he considered himself to be a celebrity.

It was a far more frank admission than his long standing excuse for the comments being just ‘locker room talk’, and the footage is all but certain to appear in attack adverts during the Presidential campaign.

The case is far from Trump’s only legal issues and is the first of a series of trials which he faces going into the primary season.

He has been charged by the Manhattan District Attorney with falsifying business records in a case which is likely to go to trial early next year.

The case relates to his $130,000 hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election.

Georgia prosecutors are examining whether he interfered with the 2020 election and are expected to announce charges over the summer.

In addition, a special counsel is looking at Trump’s role in the January 6th insurrection and whether he illegally retained classified documents after leaving the White House.

Before all of those, this October his real estate business, the Trump Organization, will go on trial for allegedly inflating the value of its assets to get preferential bank loans.

The New York state Attorney General is seeking $250m from the civil lawsuit and wants to subject the company to harsh measures which would render it difficult to continue doing business in the state.