US jury finds Donald Trump sexually abused E Jean Carroll
Jury awards Carroll approximately $5 million in damages in a civil suit accusing the former president of sexual assault and libel.
Donald Trump sexually assaulted writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by labeling her a liar, a US jury has ruled.
The verdict was read Tuesday afternoon in a Manhattan federal court just hours after jurors began deliberating after a seven-day civil trial.
Carroll had accused the former U.S. president of sexually assaulting her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and then defaming her by dismissing her story – told in a 2019 memoir – as a “con artist”.
The nine-member jury found on Tuesday that the ex-president did not rape Carroll, but they did find him liable for sexual assault and libel, The New York Times, CNN and other American news outlets reported.
The jurors awarded the former Elle magazine columnist approximately $5 million in damages. Because this was a civil matter, Trump faces no criminal consequences.
His spokesman, Steven Cheung, said on Tuesday that the former president would appeal. This means that he does not have to pay the awarded compensation as long as the judgment is challenged in court.
Carroll held her lawyer’s hand as the verdict was read Tuesday. She left the courthouse with Kaplan, smiling and wearing sunglasses, and got into a car without speaking to reporters.
“I have filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and get my life back,” Carroll said in a written statement later in the day. “Today the world finally knows the truth. This victory is not just for me, but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”
Trump, who did not attend the New York trial, had dismissed Carroll’s allegations as part of an effort to politically hurt him and boost sales of her 2019 memoir.
Trump immediately lashed out with a statement on his social media site, again claiming he doesn’t know Carroll and referring to Tuesday’s verdict as “an embarrassment” and “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”
Former US prosecutor Diana Florence told Al Jazeera that while “appeals are very common” in civil litigation, she didn’t think Trump’s legal team would be able to change the outcome in this case.
“But it seems that nothing special was going on [with the trial] that jumps out that says he will prevail,” Florence said, adding that the verdict would “very likely” be upheld.
During the trial, Trump’s legal team presented no defense, instead betting that jurors would discover that Carroll had not made a convincing case.
“What E Jean Carroll has done here is an affront to justice. She abused this system by making a false claim for money, status and political reasons, among other things,” Trump attorney Joe Tacopina said during closing arguments this week.
But Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said Monday that a 2005 Access Hollywood video in which Trump said women let him “grab them by the p***y” discredited the stories of Carroll and other women who accused Trump of assault, supported.
“He admitted on video that he did exactly the kind of things that brought us here to this courtroom,” Kaplan said in her closing argument Monday.
It remains unclear whether the verdict will have an effect on Trump’s political chances as he remains the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
“The people who are anti-Trump will stay that way, the key pro-Trump voters won’t change, and the ambivalent people I don’t think will be touched by this stuff,” Charlie said. Gerow, a GOP strategist in Pennsylvania, told the Reuters news agency.
The former president faces a host of other legal troubles, including criminal charges in New York relating to a 2016 hush money payment to a porn star and a Justice Department investigation into his alleged mishandling of secret documents.