A Manhattan federal jury has found that former U.S. President Donald Trump sexually abused writer, E. Jean Carroll, in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996.
The jury subsequently awarded her $5 million for battery and defamation, CNN reports.
Carroll had sued Trump, saying she was raped by the former president after she accompanied him into a department store fitting room in 1996.
Carroll told jurors that Trump’s lie that he didn’t rape her had shattered her life.
“At first, she thought helping Donald Trump shop for a women’s lingerie gift at a luxury department store would simply be “a funny New York thing.”
Even when, according to Carroll, the then-businessman motioned her to a dressing room as they dared each other to try on a see-through bodysuit, she imagined something like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch she’d written.
But within minutes, “my whole reason for being alive in that moment was to get out of that room,” Carroll had testified in the trial of her rape lawsuit, as earlier reported by AP News.
“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back,” Carroll told jurors.
From afar, Trump repeated his insistence that Carroll’s allegation of the 1996 rape is utter fiction, writing on his social media site that the case “is a made-up scam,” and more.
“This is a fraudulent & false story — Witch Hunt!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. His comments prompted the judge to warn Trump’s lawyers that he could bring more legal problems upon himself.
Carroll alleged that after raping her, Trump defamed her when he denied her claim and suggested she made up the story to boost sales of her book.
Trump denied all wrongdoing.
Carroll filed the lawsuit last November under the “New York State Adult Survivors Act,” a state bill which opened a look-back window for sexual assault allegations like Carroll’s with long-expired statutes of limitation.
Trump did not attend the trial. Like any defendant in a civil case, he was not required to appear in court for trial or any proceedings and has a right not to testify in his own defence.
Carroll left the courthouse after the verdict without speaking to reporters.
Trump, on his social media site Truth Social, called the jury’s verdict a “total disgrace” and said it was “continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”
He insisted that he did not know who Carroll was.
Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed the jury after the verdict and informed them they are now allowed to identify themselves publicly if they choose.
The judge suggested they remain silent.
“My advice to you is not to identify yourselves. Not now and not for a long time,” Kaplan said. “If you’re one who elects to speak to others and to identify yourselves to others, I direct you not to identify anyone else who sat on this jury. Each of you owes that to the other whatever you decided for yourself.”
“I’m not settling a political score,” Carroll said during her testimony. “I’m settling a personal score because he called me a liar repeatedly and it really has decimated my reputation. I’m a journalist – the one thing I have to have is the trust of the readers.”
Carroll’s attorney Michael Ferrara asked why she didn’t go public with her allegations when Trump first ran for president.
“I noticed that the more women who came forward to accuse him, the better he did in the polls,” she said.
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina, during cross-examination, repeatedly asked Carroll why she did not scream during the approximately 3-minute alleged attack
“I’m not a screamer,” Carroll responded. “I was too much in panic to scream.”
“You can’t beat up on me for not screaming,” she told the defence lawyer. “Women who don’t come forward, one of the reasons they don’t come forward is they are asked why they didn’t scream. Some women scream, some women don’t. It keeps women silent.”
Donald Trump’s video deposition that was played before the jury at his civil battery and defamation trial has been made public.
In the video, Trump confirms that he made the allegedly defamatory statements denying knowing Carroll, calling her allegations that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room in the mid-1990s a “hoax,” and saying she is not his type. He also tells Carroll’s attorney that she, too, is not his type. And many times during the deposition, he calls Carroll a series of names, including “nut job,” a “wack job” and “mentally sick”
