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Judge prohibits Trump attorneys from talking on columnist’s rape claim at future defamation trial.
NEW YORK (AP)— A judge ruled late Saturday that former President Donald Trump’s attorneys cannot offer legal arguments to a jury considering damages in a defamation trial based on last year’s verdict that he did not rape a writer in the mid-1990s.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan decided in an order issued before Trump’s a Jan. 16 trial to decide defamation damages against Trump, after a jury found Trump sexually mistreated writer E. Jean Carroll but did not find sufficient evidence to prove he raped her.
Trump, speaking in Iowa on Saturday as the Republican presidential frontrunner ahead of a Jan. 15 primary, referred to the judge as a “radical Democrat” and insulted E. Jean Carroll for not yelling when she was attacked. “It was all made up,” he explained.
Carroll, 80, received a $5 million verdict in May from a jury that said Trump sexually molested her in 1996 in a fancy department store dressing room and defamed her in 2022.
Trump did not attend the Manhattan trial, in which Carroll testified that a fortuitous encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman store across from Trump Tower was charming and enjoyable until he threw her against a wall in a changing room and sexually assaulted her. Trump has angrily disputed it.
In this month’s trial, a jury will decide whether Trump should be held liable for remarks he made after last year’s judgment and in 2019 as president after Carroll’s public disclosure of her mid-1990s claims in a memoir.
Carroll’s lawyers had requested the judge to issue the order, arguing that Trump’s lawyers should not be permitted to mislead jurors this month about last year’s judgement by claiming that the jury did not accept Carroll’s rape accusation.
They said that the jury’s decision reflected their opinion that Trump violently and without consent digitally entered Carroll’s vagina, which does not constitute rape under New York state law but does in other jurisdictions.
According to Carroll’s attorneys, the “sting of the defamation was Mr. Trump’s assertions that Ms. Carroll’s charge of sexual abuse was an entirely untruthful fabrication and one made up for improper or even nefarious reasons.”
Trump’s lawyer did not immediately return a message on Saturday.
Carroll is asking for $10 million in compensatory damages and significantly more in undisclosed punitive penalties during the trial. She will testify, and Trump is designated as a witness. The experiment is planned to last around a week.
Meanwhile, Trump has pleaded not guilty to four indictments, two of which accuse him of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, as well as a classified documents case and allegations that he assisted in arranging a payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her prior to the 2016 presidential election.
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