Trump found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll in civil trial and is ordered to pay $5 million

A New York jury found former President Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s but not liable for her alleged rape. 

The jury awarded her $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.

Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll, 79, had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,” the nine-person jury checked the box that said “no.” Asked whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,” the jury checked the box that said “yes.” Both allegations were elements of Carroll’s battery claim.

The six men and three women also found Trump had defamed Carroll by calling her claims a “hoax” and a “con job.”

The jury deliberated for only about three hours. It awarded Carroll just over $2 million on the battery claim and just under $3 million on the defamation claims.

“I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back. Today, the world finally knows the truth,” Carroll said in a statement Tuesday. She didn’t speak to reporters outside the courthouse.

In a separate statement, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan said: “No one is above the law, not even a former President of the United States. We are so thrilled that the jury agreed.”

Trump, a 2024 presidential candidate, has consistently denied Carroll’s claims. He blasted the verdict on his social media website shortly after the verdict was handed down.

“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE — A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” he wrote on Truth Social.

A Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement, “Make no mistake, this entire bogus case is a political endeavor targeting President Trump because he is now an overwhelming front-runner to be once again elected President of the United States.”

“This case will be appealed, and we will ultimately win,” the statement said.

The verdict marks the first time a former president has been found civilly liable for sexual misconduct.

Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, a Trump critic, said, “The jury verdict should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump.”

Carroll sued in Manhattan federal court last year, alleging Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store near his Fifth Avenue home in 1995 or 1996. She first went public with the claim in 2019 in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.”

The verdict carries no criminal implications. The legal standard for liability in the civil case — the preponderance of the evidence — wasn’t as high as in criminal cases. The civil benchmark is that it is more likely than not that something occurred, while the standard for convictions in criminal cases is proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Trump, first as president and then as a private citizen, called Carroll’s account a fiction that she concocted to boost book sales, and he has said she is “not my type.” He didn’t testify at the trial, but parts of his video deposition from October were played for the jury.

The verdict was required to be unanimous.

Carroll was her own star witness at the trial, which began April 25. “I’m here because Trump raped me,” she told jurors during her three days on the witness stand.

Carroll said she’d met Trump once before, in the late 1980s, before she bumped into him at the entrance of the department store near Trump’s home and office in Trump Tower.

Carroll, who was an advice columnist for Elle magazine at the time, said Trump told her he was shopping for a lady friend and invited her to come along. “He was very personable,” she said.

She said she’d had a fun time chatting with him as the excursion eventually led to the sixth-floor lingerie department. “He was joshing and pleasant and very funny,” she said, and they each joked about trying on lingerie.

Carroll alleged that Trump motioned her toward the dressing room and that when she went in, he “shut the door and shoved me against the wall” and raped her. “I couldn’t see anything was happening, but I could certainly feel that pain,” she said, alleging the attack lasted a “few minutes” before she was able to flee.

Carroll said that she called a friend, writer Lisa Birnbach, afterward to tell her what had happened and that Birnbach told her to call the police. Carroll said she told her “no way,” because she blamed herself for the attack.

Carroll also said that she told another friend, Carol Martin, what happened days later and that Martin urged her not to go to the police for fear Trump and his lawyers would “bury her.”

Birnbach and Martin both testified in Carroll’s behalf and supported her account.

Trump’s defense

Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina told jurors in his opening statement that Carroll’s claims were “unbelievable.”

“She is doing this for money, political reasons and status,” he alleged. “And in doing so, she is minimizing true rape victims and destroying their pain and capitalizing on them.”

When Carroll was on the witness stand, he asked whether she’d been “supposedly raped.” “I was raped,” she responded.

Tacopina also repeatedly pressed her about why she didn’t scream for help or go to the police.

“He raped me, whether I screamed or not,” Carroll told him.

Asked whether she agreed that not reporting the attack to the police “is an odd fact,” Carroll said, “Many women do not go to the police, and I understand why.”

Tacopina also grilled Carroll, a Democrat, about her politics and her old social media posts, including one from 2012 in which she said she was a “massive” fan of Trump’s show “The Apprentice.”

“I was a big fan of the show. Very impressed by it,” Carroll testified, adding that she didn’t like and wouldn’t watch the parts with Trump firing contestants.

Trump’s attorneys wound up resting their case without having put on any witnesses on the stand. Trump had been listed as a possible witness, but he waived his right to testify, Tacopina told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday.

The same day, Trump told reporters in Ireland he was returning to New York to deal with the case. His comments prompted the judge to give Trump the opportunity to change his mind about testifying, and he gave him until 5 p.m. Sunday to say whether he would like to take the stand. He didn’t.

Trump claimed Tuesday morning on Truth Social that he was being “silenced.”

“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, even as hard nosed reporters scream questions about this case at me,” he wrote. “I will therefore not speak until after the trial, but will appeal the Unconstitutional silencing of me, as a candidate, no matter the outcome!”

Other accusers

Carroll’s attorneys played excerpts from Trump’s deposition to the jury, including a part in which he misidentified a picture of Carroll in the 1980s as being his ex-wife Marla Maples.

They also tried to bolster Carroll’s case by presenting testimony from two other women who alleged they were accosted by Trump.

Jessica Leeds, 81, alleged Trump started to grope her out of the blue while they were sitting next to each other on a flight to New York in the late 1970s. The other accuser, Natasha Stoynoff, testified she’d gone to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2005 to interview him and Melania Trump for a story on their first wedding anniversary. She alleged Trump pushed her against a wall and started kissing her before a staffer interrupted them.

Trump has denied Leeds’ and Stoynoff’s allegations. At a campaign rally in 2016, he appeared to make fun of Leeds’ appearance while ridiculing her accusations, saying she “would not be my first choice.”

He defended those comments in his deposition, in which he also repeatedly insulted Carroll, her attorney Kaplan, Leeds and Stoynoff.

“I don’t want to be insulting, but when people accuse me of something, I think I have a right to be insulting because they’re insulting me. They’re doing the ultimate insult, they make up stories and then I’m not allowed to speak my mind? No. I disagree with that,” he said.

An anonymous jury

In an unusual move for a civil case, the judge used an anonymous jury, citing Trump’s history of inflammatory rhetoric about the justice system.

“It bears mention that Mr. Trump repeatedly has attacked courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters,” Kaplan said in his decision.

He said he was keeping jurors’ identities secret even from both sides’ lawyers, because “If jurors’ identities were disclosed, there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted media attention to the jurors, influence attempts, and/or of harassment or worse of jurors by supporters of Mr. Trump.”

All nine jurors selected swore they could be impartial.

The verdict might not be the last time the two sides face off in court.

Carroll filed an earlier lawsuit against Trump over allegedly defamatory comments he made about her over her rape allegations while he was president.

That case is pending in the same courthouse and before the same judge in the second case. It had been stalled in a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court over whether Trump was immune from liability because he was president at the time of the comments. The case was sent back to Kaplan last month.

In November, Carroll filed the second suit that went to trial with the rape allegation, as well as a new defamation claim stemming from Trump’s post-presidency remarks about her. She filed it after New York passed a law that opened a one-year window for adult victims of sexual offenses to file civil suits, even if the statute of limitations on their claims had expired, as it had for Carroll.