As Rudy Giuliani reels from a devastating $148 million verdict on Friday for ruining the lives of two Georgia women, the person he was acting in service to—Donald Trump—is desperately trying to dodge his own defamation disaster.
A New York federal jury in May already found that Trump sexually abused the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million. But that issue is coming back with a vengeance next month, with Trump bracing for a punishing second trial specifically over the way he defamed her from the White House by denying her claims.
At this point, the last person Trump’s lawyers want to see is the court expert who put a hefty nine-figure price tag on Giuliani’s misbehavior. The target of their ire? A Northwestern University marketing professor who analyzes social media trends.
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Court records show that the very same day Ashlee Humphreys testified in D.C. at Giuliani’s defamation trial last week, a Trump lawyer in New Jersey asked a federal judge in New York to block Humphreys from testifying against the former president.
“This court should simply exclude Dr. Humphreys’ testimony altogether,” Trump defense lawyer Michael Madaio wrote last Wednesday, asking the judge for a last-minute show of grace to avoid what could be a financial coup de grâce for Trump.
However, the defense team’s reasons for trying to push out Humphreys this late in the game seem quite ironic for a real estate tycoon who just wrapped up a trial about the way he committed bank fraud by vastly overstating his wealth. In their view, Humphreys’ assessments are… inflated.
“The damages estimations in her initial report are egregiously inflated (to the tune of millions of dollars), utilize methods which ascribe harm in an unreliable and incorrect manner; and do not accurately reflect the actual harm to plaintiff’s reputation,” Madaio wrote to U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan.
Humphreys isn’t exactly new on the scene. When Trump ghosted his own civil rape trial against Carroll in the spring—which focused mostly on whether the sexual assault actually happened at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s—the college professor testified about just how badly Trump’s public denials affected the journalist’s reputation.
Inside Kaplan’s federal courtroom in Manhattan, Humphreys explained how she had analyzed the publicity surrounding Trump’s defamatory statements. She spoke at length about “reputation repair,” using a mix of social media marketing metrics and basic math to arrive at an approximate cost that was something of an awkward construction: how much it would cost Carroll to counter the spread of Trump’s lies by purchasing equivalent TV and online content. Humphreys turns online “impressions” into dollar figures. Her final tally was something like $2.7 million.
At the end of that trial, jurors came fairly close to meeting that sum. Of the $5 million they awarded Carroll, the cost they associated with Humphreys’ reputation repair was $1.7 million.
However, that first Carroll trial focused on a relatively obscure public statement Trump made on Oct. 12, 2022, after leaving office—at a time when the White House press corps wasn’t circulating every flippant remark that came out of Trump’s mouth. Although the statement was posted to his eponymous website and his Truth Social media network account, it didn’t carry as far as the initial denials he made as president.
By comparison, the upcoming Carroll trial in January will focus on the statements Trump made during a couple of days starting on June 21, 2019.
“I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section,” said one statement attributed to “President Donald J. Trump.”
The next day, he doubled down when speaking to reporters as he boarded the Marine One presidential helicopter.
“It’s a totally false accusation,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea who she is. There’s some picture where we’re shaking hands. It looks like at some kind of event. I have my coat on. I have my wife standing next to me. And I didn’t know her husband, but he was a newscaster.”
Given the more high-profile nature of these statements—made with the heft and attention granted a U.S. president—it’s no wonder that Humphreys’ multi-tiered assessment for “calculated damages” this time topped out at nearly $21 million. A confidential version of her expert report was filed as a court exhibit back in February.
Trump’s legal team is now raising issues with that assessment, claiming that Humphreys initially included the alleged damage caused by a third statement by then-President Trump—one that Carroll is no longer suing over—but hasn’t tweaked her numbers downward.
“The initial report no longer aligns with the subject matter of this case,” Madaio wrote to the judge last week. “In the initial report, Dr. Humphreys assesses the collective harm of all three statements… resulting in an improper and inflated estimation of damages.”
On Monday, Carroll’s lead lawyer filed court papers claiming that Trump’s team is fabricating a non-issue out of whole cloth by completely ignoring that Humphreys has already reassessed her total in a supplemental report. Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan—who despite the shared surname is not related to the judge—noted that Humphreys’ “proposed reputational repair program” now tops out at $12 million.
And she called out what she called “Trump’s desperation,” attributing his defense lawyers’ sudden worries to Humphreys’ stellar performance in Washington last week.
“Trump is understandably desperate to get rid of Professor Humphreys… the only issue at the upcoming trial is the amount of damages that Carroll is entitled to receive. Professor Humphreys will be critical to Carroll’s case, and Trump’s own expert has already been disqualified. That Professor Humphreys recently testified in another case that resulted in a $108 million defamation verdict likely adds to Trump’s sense of urgency,” Kaplan wrote, citing the punitive and defamation costs in Giuliani’s recent federal case.
Humphreys has now shown herself uniquely suited to slapping a dollar figure on MAGAworld misconduct. At Giuliani’s D.C. trial last week, she told jurors that the disgraced former New York mayor had so severely damaged the reputations of Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss that it would take anywhere between $17 million and $47 million to help them recover. Days later, jurors awarded them each more than $16 million for that very task—plus another $75 million as a punishment for the conspiracy-spreading disbarred lawyer.
Until now, Judge Kaplan—like so many other federal and state judges stretching from California to New York to Florida—has shown himself increasingly impatient with Trump lawyers’ delay tactics and courtroom antics. Unless he suddenly takes a different tone, the former president is about to get a hefty price tag put on his transgressions.
