E. Jean Carroll described an assault in minute detail. (Published 2023) (2024)

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Donald Trump Sexually Abused and Defamed E. Jean Carroll, Jury Finds

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.

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.

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.

It was not clear why jurors chose the lesser offense of abuse over rape. Sexual abuse is defined in New York as subjecting a person to sexual contact without consent. Rape is defined under state law as sexual intercourse without consent that involves any penetration of the penis in the vagin*l opening.

During the trial, Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine who was well known in Manhattan media circles, had testified that the attack followed a chance encounter one evening at Bergdorf’s, a fashionable department store on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Trump, she said, asked her to help him buy a present for a female friend.

They ended up in the lingerie section, where he motioned her over to a dressing room, shut the door and began assaulting her. He shoved her against the wall and, using his weight to pin her, he pulled down her tights and forced his fingers into her vagin* and then, she said, his penis.

She pushed back, stamped with her heels and used her knee to push Mr. Trump off her, and she fled the store. Other than telling two friends, she kept the encounter a secret for more than 20 years until she disclosed it in a 2019 book excerpt in New York magazine.

Ms. Carroll and 10 other witnesses called on her behalf testified during the two-week trial. They included the friends — Lisa Birnbach, a journalist and author, and Carol Martin, a former TV anchor — in whom she had confided almost immediately after the attack, telling them what Mr. Trump had done. Two other women testified that Mr. Trump had sexually assaulted them years ago in ways that were similar to the way Ms. Carroll described being attacked.

Ms. Carroll was able to bring her lawsuit after New York State last year enacted a new law granting adult sexual abuse victims a one-year window to sue people they say abused them, even if the criminal statute of limitations had long expired.

“For far too long, survivors of sexual assault faced a wall of doubt and intimidation,” her lawyer, Ms. Kaplan, said after the verdict. “We hope and believe today’s verdict will be an important step in tearing that wall down.”

While Mr. Trump avoided the trial, he repeatedly attacked Ms. Carroll from outside the courtroom during the proceeding, initially on Truth Social and last week in an interview from a golf course in Ireland, where he suggested he would return to New York to testify in his own defense. In the end, he did not.

In his closing argument, Mr. Tacopina argued that there was no need for Mr. Trump to appear, because the incident at Bergdorf’s did not happen. He said that he presented his client’s defense through his cross-examination of Ms. Carroll and her witnesses.

“If something is completely made up," Mr. Tacopina told the jury, “the only way to defend yourself against that accusation is by challenging the people who made it up and the story itself.”

During this cross-examination, one area he focused on was Ms. Carroll’s testimony that she did not scream during the assault.

“I’m not a screamer,” she responded, adding that she was in too much of a panic. “I was fighting,” she said. “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”

Mr. Tacopina replied: “I’m not beating up on you. I’m asking you questions, Ms. Carroll.”

“No,” Ms. Carroll interjected. She said that one of the reasons women do not come forward “is because they are always asked why didn’t you scream. Some women scream. Some women don’t. It keeps women silent.”

Ms. Carroll, her voice rising as she testified, said, “I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not.”

The verdict comes as Mr. Trump confronts a barrage of legal actions. In April, he pleaded not guilty to New York fraud charges stemming from hush money paid to a p*rn star, and he faces a civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general.

Mr. Trump is also under investigation in Georgia over attempted interference in the 2020 election, and a federal special counsel is examining the discovery of sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all the cases, and argued that the lawsuits and investigations are meant to drag him down.

Ms. Carroll, during her testimony, was asked by another of her lawyers, Michael J. Ferrara, whether she was glad she had spoken publicly about what Mr. Trump did to her or regretted doing so.

“I have regretted this about a hundred times, but in the end — in the end, being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me,” she said. “I’m glad that I got to tell my story in court.”

Nate Schweber, Hurubie Meko and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Trump’s lawyer vows to appeal the verdict.

For starters, Mr. Tacopina said, the judge allowed E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers to play for the jury the Access Hollywood tape in which Mr. Trump boasted about how his status as a celebrity gave him the ability to kiss and grab women’s genitalia without asking.

“There were things that happened in this case that were beyond the pale,” Mr. Tacopina said. He added: “In New York you can’t get a fair trial.”

Mr. Tacopina defended Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify.

“This was a circus atmosphere, and having him be here would be more of a circus,” Mr. Tacopina said. He added that Mr. Trump could do little more than say, “‘I didn’t do it?’ And he said that under oath here. It’s hard to prove a negative.”

He said that he thought the anonymous jury was particularly unfair to Mr. Trump’s side.

“We should have been able to tell something about the background of these people,” he said. “Unfortunately, having anonymous jurors, even kept from the lawyers, I don’t think was fair or was right.”

When asked if the verdict would derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Mr. Tacopina had a one word answer.

“Nope,” he said.

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Most of Trump’s rivals for the G.O.P. nomination avoid attacking him over the verdict.

But Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas and a longtime critic of Mr. Trump, was quick to seize the opposition mantle. He said that, as a former prosecutor, he had seen “firsthand how a cavalier and arrogant contempt for the rule of law can backfire.”

“The jury verdict should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump,” Mr. Hutchinson said.

One long-shot for the party’s nomination, the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy, showed a reluctance to challenge the former president and his legion of supporters, who steadfastly believe in Mr. Trump’s innocence.

“I’ll say what everyone else is privately thinking: If the defendant weren’t named Donald Trump, would there even be a lawsuit?” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a statement, citing the age of the allegation, which goes back to the 1990s, and other legal actions pending against the former president.

“Believe me, it would be a lot easier for me if Trump weren’t in this race,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who has a law degree from Yale. “But in America we don’t weaponize the law with decades-old allegations to undercut our political opponents.”

New York law gave jurors three types of battery to consider in the Trump case.

To find that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll, the jurors needed to believe that it was more likely than not that Mr. Trump engaged in sexual intercourse by physical force. The judge explained that “any penetration of the penis into the vagin*l opening” constituted intercourse.

To find that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll, the jurors needed to believe that Mr. Trump subjected Ms. Carroll to sexual contact by physical force. Sexual contact is defined as touching the sexual or other intimate parts of another person, Judge Kaplan said.

Forcible touching, the judge said, “includes squeezing, grabbing, pinching, rubbing or other bodily contact that involves the application of some level of pressure to the victim’s sexual or intimate parts.”

The jury ultimately determined that Ms. Carroll had proved that Mr. Trump sexually abused her and that $2 million would “fairly and adequately compensate her.”

Jurors found that Mr. Trump should pay Ms. Carroll $20,000 in punitive damages because his conduct was, as stated in the language of the verdict form, “willfully or wantonly negligent, reckless, or done with a conscious disregard of the rights of Ms. Carroll.”

The jury also awarded damages on her allegations of defamation.

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Tacopina said Trump was vindicated by being found not liable for rape, and added that it was impossible for Trump to get a fair trial in New York City.

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Here’s a closer look at the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded Carroll.

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E. Jean Carroll described an assault in minute detail.

Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump asked her to help select a gift for a female friend. “I love to give advice, and here was Donald Trump asking me for advice about buying a present,” she said.

She described to the jury how they went to the lingerie section and stumbled upon a gray-blue bodysuit. Mr. Trump directed her to “go put this on,” she said. She declined and told him to put it on instead — banter that she described as “jesting and joshing.”

Then, she said, Mr. Trump motioned her inside the dressing room, immediately shut the door and shoved her against the wall.

Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump used his weight to pin her and pulled down her tights. She grew emotional as she spoke. “I was pushing him back,” she said, adding, “I was almost too frightened to think.”

“His fingers went into my vagin*, which was extremely painful,” Ms. Carroll said. Then, she said, he inserted his penis.

Ms. Carroll said she used her knee to push Mr. Trump away and fled.

The event had lifelong consequences, she said: “It left me unable to ever have a romantic life again.”

Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations. During cross-examination, a lawyer for the former president questioned Ms. Carroll about her politics, the decades it took her to come forward and her inability to recall the year that the alleged attack took place.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, insinuated that Ms. Carroll strategically chose to reveal her story to increase sales of a memoir in which she first publicly brought her allegation.

Ms. Carroll, however, said that she decided to go public after The New York Times’s “bombshell” reporting about Harvey Weinstein, which set off the #MeToo movement. She said that telling her story about Mr. Trump might be “a way to change the culture of sexual violence.”

The lawyer pressed Ms. Carroll repeatedly about basic facts, probing for inconsistencies and asking about her inability to remember precisely when in 1995 or 1996 the encounter occurred.

“I wish to heaven we could give you a date,” she replied.

Mr. Tacopina also questioned Ms. Carroll about whether she had screamed for help.

“I’m not a screamer,” Ms. Carroll responded. “I was fighting,” she said. “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”

Mr. Tacopina said he was not, but Ms. Carroll, her voice rising, said from the witness stand that women often keep silent about attacks because they fear being asked what they could have done to stop it.

“They are always asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’” Ms. Carroll said.

“He raped me, whether I screamed or not,” she declared.

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A woman yelled to her, “You’re so brave and beautiful,” to which Carroll said, “Thank you, thank you so much.” She didn’t answer any questions and got in a car to leave.

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A civil trial differs in key respects from a criminal case.

Instead, Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump for battery and defamation.

That means the jury was asked to determine Mr. Trump’s “liability” — whether Mr. Trump is legally responsible for harming Ms. Carroll in ways that meet New York State’s definition of battery.

The jurors began their deliberations just before noon on Tuesday. Their verdicts must be unanimous.

To have Mr. Trump found liable for battery, Ms. Carroll must clear a lower bar than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of a criminal trial. Instead, jurors must find that the “preponderance of the evidence” supports Ms. Carroll’s claim to have been raped, sexually abused or forcibly touched by Mr. Trump, meaning the jury believes the accusation is more likely true than untrue. The jury must also decide how much to award Ms. Carroll in damages if they side with her.

The jury also examined Ms. Carroll’s defamation claim, stemming from a 2022 post on Truth Social in which Mr. Trump called Ms. Carroll’s case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” The jurors have to decide if Mr. Trump knew what he was saying was false but said it anyway to meet a standard known as “actual malice.”

Should the jurors find Mr. Trump liable for defamation, they will also assess what, if any, additional damages to award to Ms. Carroll.

Ms. Carroll has not requested a specific amount of damages she is seeking for her battery claim. Last week, an expert witness called by Ms. Carroll testified it would cost as much as $2.7 million to run a campaign that would repair her reputation.

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Here’s what was said during the closing arguments.

“He just decided not to be here,” the lawyer, Michael J. Ferrara, told the jury on Monday. “He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll.”

He added, “You should draw the conclusion that that’s because he did it.”

But Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said that there was no reason for his client to appear in court. The rape allegation, he said, was a complete invention.

“Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable,” Mr. Tacopina said. “Everything in this case is one of those things.”

As closing arguments began Monday morning, Roberta A. Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lead lawyer, took the jury through the evidence, Ms. Carroll’s testimony and witnesses’ statements that she said supported it.

Ms. Kaplan said the defense’s position that Ms. Carroll and her witnesses were all lying was preposterous. “Donald Trump’s defense here is essentially that there is a vast conspiracy against him,” she said.

Over his closing that lasted more than two hours, Mr. Tacopina challenged not only Ms. Carroll’s testimony but also that of nearly every other witness who took the stand in her case.

“Donald Trump doesn’t have a story to tell here, other than to say it’s a lie,” Mr. Tacopina said in his summation. He questioned who might even be appropriate to call to the witness stand, asking, “How do you prove a negative?”