A Manhattan jury sided with advice columnist E Jean Carroll in her civil lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, whom she says raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.
The panel reached its decision Tuesday after less than three hours of deliberation, finding him liable for sexual abuse — but not rape — and ordering him to pay a total of $5 million in various damages, CNN reported.
Trump never appeared in court once.
Carroll beamed and squeezed the hand of one of her attorneys, Roberta Kaplan, as she exited the courthouse.
“We’re very happy,” she told a crowd of reporters, declining to comment further.
Trump, meanwhile, reacted angrily on social media, calling the verdict “A DISGRACE” and “A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
Carroll was able to sue for battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, passed last year to allow people who were sexually abused a one-time chance to file civil suits despite any relevant statutes of limitations.
She also accused Trump of defamation, as the former president has repeatedly responded to her claims with an array of personal insults. Trump has said Carroll was a liar and called her claim a “hoax,” which could not be true because Carroll was not his “type”. He also suggested she was too old at the time of the alleged incident to compel his sexual interest, although they would have been nearly the same age.
Carroll sought unspecified punitive and compensatory damages from the court.
Over several days’ worth of testimony before the panel of jurors and US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, the former Elle magazine columnist recounted the chance encounter with Trump in either late 1995 or early 1996. (She said that despite wishing she could pin down a more precise date, she could not.) She bumped into Trump while leaving Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman luxury department store, she said.
“Hey, you’re that advice, lady!” Trump allegedly told her.
“Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon!” she said that she responded.
Carroll said that Trump asked for her help in picking out a gift for a female friend and that she agreed because it sounded fun. But their friendly banter throughout the store gave way to Trump's alleged attack
In the lingerie section, Carroll said Trump told her to try on a lace bodysuit, and she replied by joking that he should try it on. Trump then allegedly trapped her in a dressing room, using his body weight to prevent her from escaping.
“The first push, I thought, ‘He couldn’t have meant that.’ I thought he had made a mistake. I thought it was very strange,” Carroll testified, per CNN.
“We had just been laughing 12, 15 seconds before, and here I am being pushed up against the wall. It just didn’t make any sense,” she said. “Then he put his mouth against mine, and then I understood.”
She said that she struggled.
“But he had pulled down my tights, and his fingers went into my vagina, and it was extremely painful,” Carroll testified, per Politico. “Extremely painful because he put his hand inside me and curved his fingers. As I’m sitting here today, I can still feel it.”
“Then he inserted his penis,” Carroll said in court. She added that she had “so much adrenaline” running through her at the time that she was not sure whether she spoke but was able to run away after a few minutes.
Carroll testified that she has not had sex since.
She confided in two friends, she said and chose not to tell anyone else until going public with her story in 2019.
In her lawsuit, lawyers for Carroll said she “resented the fact that practically every woman who courageously came forward with their stories of abuse was subjected to questions like ‘why didn’t you scream.’”
In one of the more tense parts of the trial, Trump attorney Joe Tacopina asked precisely that.
“You can’t beat up on me for not screaming,” Carroll told Tacopina, several news outlets reported.
“One of the reasons women don’t come forward is because they’re always asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’ Some women scream; some women don’t. It keeps women silent,” Carroll added, according to The Washington Post.
She then raised her voice to add: “He raped me whether I screamed or not!”
Tacopina’s lines of questioning were often met with resistance by Kaplan, who told him he was being “argumentative” and “repetitive,” The New York Times reported.
But he still used his time questioning Carroll to cast doubt on her story, pointing to the lack of a concrete timeframe and any police report. Tacopina also suggested it would have been very strange for Carroll not to have encountered any Bergdorf Goodman employees.
Carroll said that one of the main contributing factors to her decision to go public was the Harvey Weinstein scandal in the fall of 2017. She had been reluctant to speak up during the 2016 election because her mother was in poor health, and she saw how Trump’s supporters rallied around him when other women alleged abuse. However, she eventually came forward after her mother died and after she saw how the MeToo movement galvanized support for people who endured sexual harassment and assault.