A New York judge has said that Donald Trump’s legal team won’t be allowed to use a civil jury’s decision last year that the former president sexually abused but didn’t rape E. Jean Carroll at another trial involving the columnist set to kick off next week, this one to determine the damages he owes her for defaming her in the wake of her accusation.
The Saturday night filing by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, first reported by the Associated Press, accedes to a request by Carroll’s lawyers that Trump’s be barred “from offering any evidence, conducting any examination, or making any argument” related to last year’s trial, in which the jury found Trump liable of sexually abusing her, but failed to agree on whether what he did matched the legal definition of “rape.”
The Jan. 16 defamation trial will see a jury weigh the amount of money Trump owes Carroll for comments he made in 2019 calling her story—that he raped her in a department store dressing room decades ago—“totally false.” Last September, Kaplan ruled that the trial would skip straight to determining damages, as the comments were “substantially the same” as the remarks at the heart of a separate defamation claim Carroll won against Trump in May.
Given that Trump has already been determined liable for defamation, the rape conclusion is not relevant, according to Kaplan. “Whether Mr. Trump forcibly and without Ms. Carroll’s consent penetrated her vagina with his fingers—as the Carroll II jury and the Court both found—or also with his penis has nothing to do with injury inflicted on her by the defamatory statements,” he wrote.
Any introduction of the matter would “lead to a mini-trial” that would see the relitigation of an issue already settled, Kaplan said, “and thus waste time and confuse the jury.”
The May jury awarded Carroll $5 million on the basis of battery and defamation. Though they concluded that Trump was not liable for rape, Kaplan later wrote that he had in fact “‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Trump’s lawyers have attempted in vain to delay his second trial, asking earlier this month for additional time to consider possible options after losing a previous bid based on a presidential immunity argument. A federal appeals court shot the request down without elaboration last week.
A few days later, Trump had a meltdown on Truth Social, publishing 31 posts about Carroll, most of them clips of her media appearances and links to conservative news articles, in the span of 28 minutes. Many of the posts were accompanied by an identical caption in which he railed against her and Kaplan.
“The Judge on the Case is another Highly Partisan Clinton-Appointed Friend,” Trump fumed. “He should have recused himself long ago!”
