• A jury of six men and three women awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages.
• Donald J. Trump called the verdict a “disgrace.”
A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found former President Donald J. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages.
More than a dozen women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct over the years, but this is the only allegation to be affirmed by a jury.
In the civil case, the federal jury of six men and three women found that Ms. Carroll, 79, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently proved that Mr. Trump sexually abused her nearly 30 years ago in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find he had raped her, as she had long claimed.
The jury, in returning the verdict shortly before 3 p.m., also found that Mr. Trump, who is running to regain the presidency, defamed Ms. Carroll in October when he posted a statement on his Truth Social platform calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” His lawyer said he intended to appeal.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers called no witnesses, and he never appeared at the trial to hear Ms. Carroll, who had sued him last year, deliver visceral testimony about the attack she said had ended her romantic life forever.
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Donald Trump at a lectern
Donald Trump, who avoided the trial, continued to say he did not know Ms. Carroll.
On Tuesday, Ms. Carroll nodded along as a court clerk read the verdict aloud, her nod growing more pronounced as the clerk said Mr. Trump was liable for defamation. She walked out of the courthouse grinning from ear to ear, holding hands with her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan. A woman yelled to Ms. Carroll, “You’re so brave and beautiful.” Ms. Carroll replied, “Thank you, thank you so much.”
In a later statement, she said: “I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back. 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.”
For decades, Mr. Trump had reveled in projecting the image of a man irresistible to women, engineering tabloid headlines like “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,” appearing in the introduction of a 1999 Playboy magazine centerfold video and bragging in an exchange caught on video about how, as a celebrity, he could grab women’s genitals with impunity. Now the jury has labeled him not a Lothario but an abuser.
Its unanimous verdict came after just under three hours of deliberation. The findings are civil, not criminal, meaning Mr. Trump has not been convicted of any crime and faces no prison time.
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E. Jean Carroll leaves court in her sunglasses.
“Today, the world finally knows the truth,” Ms. Carroll said after court. “This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”Credit…Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
In a Truth Social post after the verdict, Mr. Trump continued to insist that he did not know Ms. Carroll: “I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. This verdict is a disgrace — a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!”
His lawyer Joseph Tacopina said outside the courthouse that the case would be appealed. He also defended Mr. Trump’s absence from the courtroom and his decision not to testify in his own defense.
“This was a circus atmosphere, and having him be here would be more of a circus,” Mr. Tacopina said.
He noted that Mr. Trump had denied Ms. Carroll’s allegation in a video deposition that her lawyers played for the jury. He also said Ms. Carroll’s lawyers should never have been allowed to play the “Access Hollywood” recording for the jury, in which Mr. Trump was captured boasting in vulgar terms about grabbing women by the genitals.
And he complained about the decision by the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, to have an anonymous jury hear the case, with their names kept even from the lawyers.
“There were things that happened in this case that were beyond the pale,” said Mr. Tacopina, who also complained about what he said was “bias displayed by the court.”
Mr. Tacopina clashed with Judge Kaplan at times and even filed a motion seeking a mistrial based on “pervasive, unfair and prejudicial rulings” based in part on what he described as the judge’s improperly sustaining objections by Ms. Carroll’s lawyers, who argued that his questions were argumentative.
At one point, Judge Kaplan quoted the definition of “an argumentative question” from Black’s Law Dictionary, reading it aloud to Mr. Tacopina.
During his instructions to the jury on Tuesday, the judge explained their three options for finding Mr. Trump liable for battery, meaning an assault on Ms. Carroll: that he had raped her, sexually abused her or forcibly touched her. A unanimous vote would affirm that Ms. Carroll had proven that it was more likely than not to be true that he had committed an offense, the judge explained.
In a criminal case, when jurors are asked to assess guilt, they must meet the much higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
New York Times
