Bad news for Donald Trump this week: his bid to get the jury’s verdict in his sexual abuse civil suit was denied by the judge overseeing the case. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled definitively that the finding in the case that Trump had sexually abused journalist E. Jean Carroll in the late ’90s was correct, at least in the jury’s determination, and the award of $2 million in damages ordered by the jury was not excessive.
The Trump defense team had argued that as the jury had found him liable for sexual abuse and not rape specifically, the award was comparatively extravagant. However, Judge Kaplan felt that the jury’s finding did “not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as people commonly understand the word rape. Indeed…the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
READ MORE: Donald Trump Is Liable For Battery And Defamation, Jury Rules
Donald Trump Was Found Liable For Sexual Abuse And Defamation In E. Jean Carroll Case
Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s for the first time publicly in her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. In response to her allegations, Trump publicly denied the incident and made statements that Carroll claimed defamed her character.
Carroll then filed a defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump in November 2019, seeking damages for the harm caused by his statements. During the trial, Carroll testified that "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." On May 9th, the columnist was awarded a total of nearly $5 million, with $2 million of that in damages for her civil battery claim and approximately $3 million for proving her defamation claim against former president Trump.
Judge Kaplan's upholding of the jury's ruling severely undercuts the defense's argument that the compensatory damages for the defamation claim should be reduced. The argument also disputed the testimony of an expert witness, and asserted that an additional punitive damages award to Carroll of $228,000 violated former president Trump's constitutional right to due process.
Judge In Carroll Case Upholds Jury Verdict: 'The Proof Convincingly Established' Sexual Assault
A major argument from the defense team seemed to be that, while the case may have proved sexual abuse in the jury's eyes, it did not prove rape in the strictest legal definition of the word. Carroll had alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store decades earlier, and testified that while he did touch her unwillingly, she did not know if he had assaulted her in other ways because he had been positioned in such a way that had obstructed her view. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his decision responding to the former president's request to have the verdict overturned, "The proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm."
Kaplan continued that the defense team's argument "therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and mistakenly focuses on the New York Penal Law definition of 'rape' to the exclusion of the meaning of that word as it often is used in everyday life and of the evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump. The jury in this case did not reach 'a seriously erroneous result'. Its verdict is not 'a miscarriage of justice.'"
Donald Trump is also contesting the E. Jean Carroll civil suit verdict before a federal appeals court. The former president faces several other court cases including indictments for alleged hush money payments and for retaining classified government documents.
