Court Rejects Trump’s Motion For New Trial, Brands Trump A Digital Rapist In Carroll Case

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Since before the first E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, Trump’s lawyers have fixated on the bizarre theory that it somehow doesn’t count if there’s no penis involved.

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He made that argument in an attempt to disqualify testimony by other women who accused the former president of groping but not raping them. He made it in his counterclaim in Carroll I, arguing that the the jury’s verdict that Trump sexually abused but did not rape the advice columnist, meant that she was a liar who defamed him. His minions have cheerfully parroted the line, with Alan Dershowitz crowing that the jury only found Trump “liable on kinda molesting her.” And he made it in his motion for a new trial or remittitur, arguing that the jury must have been confused when it assessed $2 million in compensatory damages for conduct which could have amounted to no more than “groping of [Carroll’s] breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape.”

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After more than three years of shenanigans from Trump and his lawyers, this motion appears to have landed very badly with Judge Lewis Kaplan.

“Mr. Trump is right that a $2 million award for such groping alone could well be regarded as excessive, that undermines rather than supports his argument,” he wrote, adding that “Mr. Trump’s argument therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and mistakenly focuses on the New York Penal Law definition of ‘rape’ to the exclusion of the meaning of that word as it often is used in everyday life and of the evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump.”

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Judge Kaplan not only rejected the motion for new trial, he took the occasion to recap all the incredibly damaging testimony and point out that Trump presented absolutely no defense when he had the chance, but instead seeks to undo the jury verdict by eliding the difference between the colloquial definition of “rape,” and that of New York’s law.

“The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law 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,” the court noted, citing dictionaries and other jurisdictions’ laws defining “rape” as non-consensual penetration of any kind. “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law 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.”

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The court scoffed at Trump’s effort to reinterpret the jury’s finding that he did not successfully manage to penetrate Carroll with his penis as a wholesale refutation of her account of the attack. In fact, the jury clearly believed her when she she said that the she had experienced tremendous pain from being digitally penetrated by the former president in the long-ago attack in a department store dressing room — hence the $2 million verdict on the sexual abuse count. And they very clearly did not believe Trump when he said he’d never met her and that she had concocted the story as part of a political hoax — hence the $3 million defamation award.

In fact, the jury could have interpreted Trump’s prior statements as a confession that he “digitally raped” Carroll:

Mr. Trump’s own words from the Access Hollywood tape and from his deposition – that (a) stars “[u]nfortunately or fortunately” “c[ould] do anything” they wished to do to women, including “grab[bing] them by the pussy” and (b) he considers himself to be a “star” – could have been regarded by the jury as a sort of personal confession as to his behavior. Thus, there was ample, arguably overwhelming evidence, that Mr. Trump forcibly digitally penetrated Ms. Carroll, thus fully supporting the jury’s sexual abuse finding.

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Finally, the court observed that Trump didn’t deny raping Carroll under the narrow definition of New York Penal Law — he said she was a liar and he’d never met her. And so his statement could be reasonably construed as defamatory if the jury found, as it did, that this conduct only met the legal standard for sexual abuse.

“There is thus no factual or legal support for Mr. Trump’s made-up version of Ms. Carroll’s defamation claim,” Judge Kaplan concluded, kicking closed a door which Trump probably wishes he’d never opened.

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One among so, very many.

Carroll v. Trump I [Docket via Court Listener]
Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Courts, Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll