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Donald Trump’s patented legal strategy of making himself as obnoxious as possible has once again yielded the predictable result, as the judge in the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases dropkicked the motion for a new trial in a blistering ruling branding Trump a rapist in at least the colloquial sense.
The case history is byzantine, due largely to Trump’s inability to shut the hell up. In 2019, Carroll accused the then-president of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the mid-’90s. He not only denied the claims, but accused her of participating in a hoax funded by dastardly Democrats. She sued in New York state court, but US Attorney General Bill Barr removed the case to federal court on the theory that Trump was doing official president stuff when he said she was too unattractive to assault.
That last issue delayed that case (Carroll I) for years, after the Second Circuit disagreed with Judge Lewis Kaplan’s finding that Trump was acting in a personal capacity and then punted the issue to the DC Court of Appeals to apply DC’s employment law. It took a year, but the DC judges finally returned the case to the Second Circuit, without an opinion, but with several dozen pages of hemming and hawing about factors the presiding judge needed to consider. And eventually the Second Circuit kicked it back to Judge Kaplan, where it sits now.
But while all that was going down, the Justice Department reversed course and decided that Trump constantly shittalking Carroll after leaving office meant that he was probably not acting within the scope of his official duties when he did it in 2019. Also he admitted in deposition testimony that he never read Carroll’s book before he said it was crap, had no idea whether or not she was cahootsing with evil Dems when he stated it as fact, and slagged her because “I have a right to defend myself.” Citing these factors, the DOJ withdrew its motion to substitute the government as defendant because “The evidence of personal motivation that has been developed in this case outweighs any public purpose inference one might draw in other circumstances.”
In the meantime, Trump could not shut his mouth, and so he repeated the defamatory allegations on Truth Social in October of 2022, a month before New York’s Adult Survivors Act came into effect, giving a year for survivors of sexual violence to file tort claims which would otherwise be time-barred. On Thanksgiving of 2022, Carroll filed her second suit (Carroll II), alleging sexual assault under the ASA and defamation for the 2022 statement.
The parties hoped to combine the two cases, but the DC Court of Appeals failed to render its non-verdict in time. Which is how Carroll II wound up going to trial before Carroll I.
In May, the jury awarded Carroll $2 million for sexual assault and $3 million for defamation. But it did not find that Trump was liable for “rape,” having failed to conclude from Carroll’s testimony that he successfully managed to penetrate her with his penis. The MAGA faithful immediately tried to spin this is a glorious victory and proof that the jurors had called Carroll a liar.
It’s not the worst PR strategy ever concocted. It is not, however a legal strategy which should ever have appeared in a court filing. So naturally, Trump’s lawyers raced to do exactly that. Twice.
First, they filed a motion for a new trial or remittitur in Carroll II on the theory that the jury must have been confused because it awarded Carroll $2 million in damages for the assault, even after finding Trump not liable for rape. And then they filed a counterclaim in Carroll I on the theory that Carroll defamed him by saying that she thought “oh yes he did, oh yes he did” when asked on CNN what went through her mind when she heard the jury’s finding that Trump was not liable for rape. As if a report of someone’s subjective, real-time reaction could ever be defamatory!
Carroll’s excellent legal team moved to strike the counterclaim, noting that the conduct the jury did find him liable for, i.e. sexual assault, earns you a spot on the sex offender registry in most jurisdictions. To be clear, Carroll testified in excruciating detail about feeling Trump jamming his fingers into her vagina and “rummaging around,” something which has caused her painful flashbacks for all these years.
And the court itself demolished Trump’s claims that the jury could not possibly have awarded $2 million for conduct which could amount to no more than “groping of [Ms. Carroll’s] breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape.”
“The jury’s unanimous verdict in Carroll II was almost entirely in favor of Ms. Carroll,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote. “The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law — a section that provides that the label ‘rape’ as used in criminal prosecutions in New York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials is not called ‘rape’ under the New York Penal Law. It instead is labeled ‘sexual abuse.’”
The court went on to observe that non-consensual penetration meets both the colloquial definition of rape in many people’s minds, and the legal definition in some other jurisdictions, castigating the defendant for pretending that the jury verdict repudiated Carroll’s claims.
“This jury did not award Ms. Carroll more than $2 million for groping her breasts through her clothing, wrongful as that might have been. There was no evidence at all of such behavior. Instead, 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. Mr. Trump’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.”
Indeed the court went even further than that, branding Trump a digital rapist:
“The trial evidence of the harm to Ms. Carroll as a result of being assaulted and digitally raped supports the jury’s $2 million award as reasonable compensation for her pain and suffering.”
That is very bad news for Trump, and not just because he’s been functionally branded a rapist by the judge overseeing the Carroll I case in January of 2024 (even as his eleventy-seven criminal trials will be ongoing). Worse for Trump, Carroll has moved to treat the Carroll II jury’s finding that Trump did sexually assault her as the law of the case, i.e. a fact already determined which does not need to be proved to a jury a second time. If the court accepts the prior jury verdict as binding, then the only issue left for the jury will be damages for the 2019 defamation claim.
Well … okay, that’s not entirely correct. Because true to form, Trump could not just shut the fuck up for the love of God, man. So the day after the jury verdict in Carroll II, he repeated the same lies about her again during that disastrous town hall with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, prompting Carroll to amend her complaint yet again to add the most recent lies.
Keep talking, asshole. It’s working … but maybe not in the way you think.
[Carroll v. Trump I, Docket via Court Listener / Carroll v. Trump II, Docket via Court Listener]
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