A jury in New York ruled Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is responsible for sexual assault in the civil trial against him over writer E. Jean Carroll's allegation that he assaulted her at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Carroll charged the former president with rape, but the jury found him not responsible. He did blame Trump for defamation for saying Carroll fabricated his accusations to sell books. In its verdict, the jury condemns Trump to pay five million dollars to Carroll in compensation for those acts.
The nine jurors reached the decision after only hours of deliberations, and after Trump, who ultimately declined to testify, insisted he did not know Carroll, that he did not sexually assault her, and that the allegations are "fraudulent."
E. Jean Carroll arrives in federal court on May 8, 2023.Seth Wenig/AP
In his closing argument, Trump's lawyer, Joe Tacopina, insisted to jurors that Carroll's story was too implausible to be believed. He repeated the theory of the invention to promote his 2019 memoir, in which he first publicly referred to rape with the aim, according to the lawyer, of discrediting Trump for political reasons.
Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, cited excerpts from Trump's October 2022 statement and words to the 2005 Access Hollywood television show about celebrities' right to grab women between their legs without asking their permission.
["I'm here because Trump raped me," writer E. Jean Carroll tells a courtroom]
The lawyer argued that Trump's public statements support her case. "In a very real sense, Donald Trump is a witness against himself. He knows what he did. He knows he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll," she said.
"He didn't even bother to show up here in person," Kaplan complained, referring to the former president's failure to attend the two-week trial.
"He lied and destroyed my reputation"
Carroll testified during the trial that she met Trump in 1987 at a Saturday Night Live party, where she was a writer. She and her husband, a local news anchor, took a photo with Trump and his then-wife Ivana, she said.
According to his account, the next time they saw each other was at the Bergdorf Goodman department store near Trump Tower in 1995 or 1996. It was a lighthearted interaction in which the two teased each other trying on a lingerie garment, he said, until he became violent inside a fitting room.
"He lied and destroyed my reputation, and I'm trying to get my life back," Carroll said on the stand.
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Tacopina told jurors there was no reason to call Trump to the stand as a witness when Carroll couldn't even remember when the alleged encounter occurred. In his opinion, Carroll invented his story after an episode of the television series Law and Order aired in 2012, in which a woman is raped in the lingerie fitting room of a Bergdorf Goodman store.
"They modeled their secret scheme on an episode of one of the most popular shows on television," he argued.
Two friends of the writer testified, however, that she told them about Trump's alleged rape shortly after it happened, many years before the series aired.
