A federal court jury in New York on Tuesday awarded a onetime magazine advice columnist about $5 million after concluding that Donald Trump was liable for sexually abusing her 20 years before he became the U.S. president and then defamed her by dismissing the encounter as a "hoax."
The nine-member jury — six men and three women — reached its decision after three hours of deliberation, the first time Trump had faced a trial to hold him to account on widespread allegations over many years from women accusing him of unwanted sexual advances.
The jury rejected the claim by E. Jean Carroll, now 79, that Trump had raped her in the dressing room at the upscale Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York sometime in 1996. But it concluded that he sexually abused her, awarding her about $2 million on that allegation.
It awarded Carroll another $3 million for Trump's repeated claims publicly and on his social media accounts that her allegations were "a scam" and "a complete con job."
Carroll emerged from the courthouse smiling but did not stop to talk to a gaggle of news reporters.
A woman yelled to her, "You're so brave and beautiful," to which Carroll said, "Thank you, thank you so much."
'This verdict is a disgrace'
Trump slammed the decision, insisting he is the subject of a witch hunt.
"This verdict is a disgrace — a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time," the former president, using all capital letters, posted on his Truth Social media platform.
"I have absolutely no idea who this woman is," he said of Carroll.
Trump is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination after losing his 2020 reelection bid. He is facing several criminal investigations stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 outcome and his retention of classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
But the allegations made by Carroll were adjudicated in a civil, not criminal case, and as a result carried no threat of a conviction or imprisonment for the 76-year-old Trump.
Instead, the jury had to decide by a unanimous vote whether there was a preponderance of evidence to believe Carroll's contention that after a chance encounter with Trump at Bergdorf Goodman, he lured her into a dressing room in the lingerie department, quickly pinning her against a wall, pulling down her tights, opening his pants and sexually assaulting her.
Trump did not appear in the courtroom, nor was he required to, to hear Carroll's account. Two other women testified on her behalf that Trump assaulted them decades ago in similar fashion: A onetime stock broker said he groped her in the first-class cabin of a New York-bound flight and a journalist alleged that he suddenly started kissing her at Mar-a-Lago while she was there to report a story for People magazine on the first anniversary of his marriage to his third wife, former first lady Melania Trump.
No defense witnesses called
Trump's defense attorney, Joseph Tacopina, called no defense witnesses in the case and instead tried to chip away at Carroll's account of the incident, noting that she could not remember the exact date the attack occurred, never reported it to police at the time, nor went to a hospital for treatment, and only first made her allegation public in a 2019 memoir.
"It's the most ridiculous, disgusting story. It's just made up," Tacopina told the jurors in his closing argument on Monday. Earlier, as the case opened two weeks ago, Tacopina said, "There are no witnesses to call to prove a negative" and that jurors would have to "believe the unbelievable" to rule in favor of Carroll, who sought a retraction of Trump's denial of the incident and unspecified monetary damages.
On the witness stand, Carroll gave a searing account of her encounter with Trump, even as she acknowledged she could not precisely pinpoint the date it occurred, although trial testimony indicated it might have been in the spring of 1996 on an early Thursday evening when the store was open later for shoppers.
Carroll testified that Trump used his weight to pin her against the dressing room enclosure. "I was pushing him back," she said. "I was almost too frightened to think."
"His fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful," Carroll said. Then, she said, he inserted his penis, before she said she used her knee to push him away and fled.
She said that she was so traumatized by the incident that "it left me unable to ever have a romantic life again."
During an extensive cross-examination by Tacopina, Carroll acknowledged that she did not scream for help.
In a taped video deposition from last October that Carroll's lawyers showed jurors, Trump claimed that he would not have attacked Carroll, once an Indiana University cheerleader and beauty queen at the school, because she was not his type. But he undercut his own claim when he was shown a picture of himself with Carroll at a New York social event in the 1970s: He misidentified her as his second wife, Marla Maples, while acknowledging all three of his wives were the type of women he was attracted to.
Carroll's lawyers also showed jurors the 2005 video from the celebrity TV show "Access Hollywood," in which Trump claimed that women allowed him to start kissing them and grabbing them by their genitals because he was a star.
Carroll lawyer Roberta Kaplan said Trump may not have appeared in court to testify in the case, but contended in her closing statement to the jurors that the videotape showed how he treated women.
"What is he doing here?" Kaplan asked jurors.
"He is telling you in his own words his modus operandi, his M.O. ... he kissed them without their consent," she said. "The evidence shows overwhelmingly he followed this playbook and in the dressing room ... grabbed" Carroll and assaulted her.