E. Jean Carroll, arrives in court this Tuesday. JUSTIN LANE (EFE)
The nine members, six men and three women, who form the jury in the case for alleged rape against Donald Trump have reached a verdict on Tuesday in record time, less than three hours, in a process also marked by speed, just two weeks, in which the defendant has not appeared and his defense has renounced to call witnesses. The jury has determined that there was no rape, but sexual abuse, in the civil, not criminal, trial, in which, in addition to the ruling, it had to agree on the amount of compensation requested by the complainant, former Elle E. columnist Jean Carroll. Of all the accusations of sexual harassment and abuse that have dogged Trump in recent decades, this is the only one that has come to trial, at a time when the candidate for re-election in 2024 faces a battery of processes, prosecutors and politicians, at the head of all of them, the indictment in April of 34 crimes for black payments to a porn actress.
According to Carroll's complaint, filed in 2019 in the heat of the MeToo movement, Trump raped her in a fitting room of a luxury department store in Manhattan, on a Thursday in the spring of 1996, something that the tycoon has always denied. Then, in 2019, when Carroll dared to publicly recount the event in a book, he defamed her with two bloody messages on social media, which the whistleblower says ruined her reputation. Trump declined to appear – he had until last Sunday afternoon – a fact that was one of the main assets of the accusation.
Although his identity has been kept secret, six men, mostly from ethnic minorities, and three women aged between 55 and 65 - according to some observers, more likely to believe Carroll's version - have determined that there was sexual abuse, but not rape, committed against Carroll, 79 years after the quick trial held in the federal court in Manhattan (New York).
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