A jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing columnist E. Jean Carroll but found him not guilty of raping the woman.
She was, however, awarded $5 million in a judgment that could question the former president’s quest for a second tenure in office.
The Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped by Donald Trump, but found him responsible for a lesser degree of sexual assault, offering some vindication to Carroll, whose allegations had been dismissed by Trump for years.
The Jurors also found Trump who did not attend the trial and was absent when the verdict was read, guilty of defamation.
In response, Trump called the verdict “a disgrace”, and“a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time” and said he will appeal, stressing that he does not know who Carroll was.
Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina who shook hands with Carroll and hugged her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan said that the jury’s decision to find the ex-president not guilty of rape but guilty of sexual assault was “perplexing”and“strange.”
“Part of me was obviously very happy that Donald Trump was not branded a rapist,” he said. However, Roberta referred to the court trial as a joke.
“a circus atmosphere, and having him be here would be more of a circus,” he said.
Jean Carroll in a statement made after the judgment said she sued 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.”
Her lawyer said her case would prove nobody is above the law,“not even the president of the United States.”
Carroll was one of the many women who have come out to accuse Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault or harassment. In 2019, She went public alleging that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a posh Manhattan department store.
Trump denied it, saying he never met Carroll at the store and never knew her, calling her a“nut job”who invented“a fraudulent and false story”to sell a memoir.
Carroll, who is 79 years old, sought unspecified damages, plus a retraction of what she said was Trump’s defamatory denials of her claims.
During the trial, two witnesses who were friends of Carroll took the stand and told jurors she had reported the rape to them in the moments and day afterward.
The trial also had Jessica Leeds, a former stockbroker testify that Trump abruptly groped her against her will on an airplane in the 1970s, and from Natasha Stoynoff, a writer who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her against her wish while she was interviewing him for a 2005 article.
The jury also saw the popular“Access Hollywood”hot mic recording of Trump where he talked about kissing and grabbing women without asking.
Trump is also standing trial for a criminal case involving hush money payments made to a porn actor, his mishandling of classified documents, involvement in the 2020 election and during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Carroll, wrote for an Elle magazine advice column for 27 years, met Donald Trump in a 1987 house party. Though a photo had them together with their spouses then, Trump said he doesn’t remember it.
According to Carroll, Donald Trump raped her when they found themselves together in a dressing room
She said it happened at Bergdorf Goodman on an unspecified Thursday evening in spring 1996, when they went to a lingerie department so he could search for a women’s gift.
She alleged that they were soon teasing each other about trying on a skimpy bodysuit when Trump slammed the door, pinned her against a wall, planted his mouth on hers, yanked her tights down and raped her as she tried to break away. Carroll said she escaped by pushing him off with her knee and immediately left the store.
She said she did not report the rape to the police but only told two friends because she feared Donald Trump and also the the trauma that comes with the case.
Trump’s lawyer told the jury that Carroll had made her story up after watching an episode of “Law and Order” in in which a woman is raped in the dressing room of the lingerie section of a Bergdorf Goodman store.
Carroll“cannot produce any objective evidence to back up her claim because it didn’t happen,”he told jurors. He accused her of“advancing a false claim of rape for money, for political reasons and for status.”
He questioned her on fighting off a far heavier Trump without dropping her handbag or ripping her tights, and without anyone around to hear or see them in the upscale retailer’s lingerie section – not screaming, looking for help while fleeing the store, or seeking out medical attention, security video or the police.
“I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not,”was her reply.
