Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in the civil case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll was rejected by a federal judge Wednesday after a jury in May found him liable for sexually abusing her.
The decision also noted that while the jury found that “Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law,” that does not mean “that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” the decision says.
In rejecting the former president’s bid for a new trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said he had considered Trump’s arguments “and found them all unpersuasive.”
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“The jury in this case did not reach ‘a seriously erroneous result,’” Kaplan wrote. “Its verdict is not ‘a miscarriage of justice.’”
Carroll sued Trump after alleging that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and that he later defamed her by dismissing her claims in 2022 as a “Hoax and a lie.”
After deliberating, the jury found that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation but did not find him liable for rape. In his calls for a new trial, the former president said that awarding $2 million to Carroll in damages for the sexual abuse was “excessive” because the jurors had determined that he hadn’t raped her.
Addressing that particular decision, Kaplan wrote: “The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law—a section that provides that the label ‘rape’ as used in criminal prosecutions in New York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis.”
He went on to note that that particular definition “is far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”
Kaplan also rejected the argument that the $2 million in compensatory damages for sexual abuse was excessive because, as Trump claims, the verdict could have been based on the “groping of [Ms. Carroll’s] breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape.”
“This jury did not award Ms. Carroll more than $2 million for groping her breasts through her clothing, wrongful as that might have been,” the judge wrote. “There was no evidence at all of such behavior. Instead, the proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”
As such, Trump’s argument ignored the “bulk of the evidence at trial” and misrepresented the jury’s verdict, Kaplan wrote. “There is no basis for disturbing the jury’s sexual assault damages.” he added. “And Mr. Trump’s arguments with respect to the defamation damages are no stronger.”
Carroll was awarded $5 million in total as a result of the verdict in the case, referred to as Carroll II because it was the second lawsuit she filed against Trump. The first, Carroll I, began in 2019 while Trump was still in the White House. The earlier case, which is scheduled to go to trial next year, was similarly based on the claim that Trump had defamed her by denying her rape allegation.
“Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to decrease the amount of the verdict, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her in Carroll II,” Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan said in a statement. “She also looks forward to continuing to hold Trump accountable for what he did to her at the trial in Carroll I, which is scheduled to begin on January 15, 2024.”
