With Donald Trump’s second rape defamation trial only one week away, a federal judge has rewarded the billionaire’s unceasing legal insolence and delusional defense strategy with a brutal order laying out just how punishing the court battle is going to be.
Until recently, the former president’s lawyers had been preparing for the upcoming defamation trial as if the first one never happened—seeing it as a chance to rewrite history and try to clear Trump’s name after a jury last year concluded he sexually assaulted the journalist E. Jean Carroll decades ago.
But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan made it clear that Trump is not getting another go at whether he raped Carroll.
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“In other words, the material facts concerning the alleged sexual assault already have been determined, and this trial will not be a ‘do over’ of the previous trial,” Kaplan wrote in an order.
In the 27-page order, the federal judge reiterated that the jury will merely be deciding how badly to reprimand Trump for dragging Carroll’s name through the mud while he was at the White House in 2019—when he denied a coercive sexual encounter that did, according to a jury last year, occur.
This new jury will see the most damning evidence of Trump’s misogyny, from the Access Hollywood tape in which he gloats about how he can “grab them by the pussy” to the videotaped deposition where he remarks that stars get away with sexual assault “unfortunately—or fortunately.”
The previous iteration of this case dealt with the defamatory denials Trump made after leaving office, a trial that cost him $5 million in damages (which he apparently paid).
The second defamation trial, which begins next week, deals with the denials Trump made as U.S. president, with all the additional attention and gravitas his former position of power bestowed upon him at the time he made those comments.
Kaplan’s order on Tuesday clarified that Trump will have the obligation—but not the right—to remain silent about nearly everything the billionaire intended to say in court.
“Mr. Trump and his counsel are precluded, in the presence of the jury, from claiming that Mr. Trump did not sexually abuse (“rape”) Ms. Carroll, that he did not make his… 2019 statements concerning Ms. Carroll with actual malice… or that Ms. Carroll fabricated her account,” he wrote.
Trump can’t even say he didn’t believe Carroll was telling the truth about their encounter in the 1990s, the judge wrote.
That means Trump’s big claims that he plans to finally speak up and testify at this trial—after notably ghosting the first one—might amount to nothing but grandstanding. The calculation has flipped, and Trump potentially stands much more to lose by showing up now that he’ll be effectively wearing a courtroom muzzle.
Trump is also barred from discussing DNA, a major sticking point in the first iteration of the case last year that Kaplan referred to as “the long saga” in the case.
Former President Donald Trump campaigns in Newton, Iowa.
Sergio Flores/ReutersFrom the moment she first revealed her allegations in an explosive New York magazine column, Carroll announced she had kept the black coat dress she wore the evening he led her into a dressing room at the high-end Manhattan department store, Bergdorf Goodman. Her lawyers got it tested at a California laboratory that actually discovered several human DNA samples—despite the fact that it apparently remained hung in her closet for decades—but Trump refused to subject himself to a test that would potentially match his genetic material to whatever was still on that coat.
Instead, the trial proceeded as a he-said, she-said case based solely on each other’s recollection of the incident—as well as a mountain of first-hand accounts that Trump had similarly attacked other women over the years.
Trump’s last-minute offer to get tested shortly before the start of the first trial seemed to be interpreted by the judge as a bad-faith public relations maneuver made only after the exchange of evidence had officially ended.
This time around, Kaplan wrote, Trump can’t even touch that subject in front of the jury thanks to “his own unjustified refusal to provide a sample of his own DNA on a timely basis.”
In response to Trump’s argument that there’s no “conclusive scientific proof” that he committed a sexual assault, Kaplan notes that “Mr. Trump himself is the primary reason why there is no DNA comparison evidence in this case.” The judge ruled that bringing up the lack of DNA evidence would be “fundamentally unfair and substantially prejudicial” to Carroll.
Unlike Trump, who keeps making all kinds of disparaging remarks about Carroll in public, his lawyers in court won’t be able to discuss her past romantic relationships, imply that she’s engaged in some kind of nasty political vendetta, or address how she chose her lawyer.
In his order, the judge chucked aside Trump’s argument that Carroll’s decision to hire Roberta Kaplan—a high-profile attorney who once argued in favor of same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court—had anything to do with the damages she experienced when Trump defamed her. The judge found the argument “unpersuasive” and said it lacked “any merit.”
Trump’s lawyers also can’t tell jurors anything about how the journalist is funding her lawsuit, the judge ruled.
Last year, court filings revealed that Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, the billionaire behind LinkedIn, has been quietly bankrolling Carroll’s case.
Taken all together, the judge’s order means New York jurors who come together next week will decide the case without getting inundated with the rage Trump has been dishing out nonstop on his Truth Social network—as long as they follow the judge’s rules by staying off the internet during the course of the trial and sticking to the evidence presented in court.
