A federal jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of a New York City department store. The jury found that Carroll’s attorneys had failed to prove the rape allegations, but the jurors did agree that Trump had forcibly sexually abused her. The jury determined that Trump must pay Carroll $5 million.
The nine-person jury—a panel of six men and three women—took less than three hours to deliberate. The short deliberation was a something of a surprise. Carroll herself was on the stand for several days, describing the alleged incident. Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, talked for more than two-and-a-half hours in his closing argument on Monday, nearly as long as the jury deliberated.
Carroll wrote a book in 2019 in which she accused Trump of the assault, which she said took place after she ran into him at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, located across the street from Trump Tower, and he asked her to help him shop for a gift for a woman. On the stand, Carroll testified that she immediately told two friends, both of whom testified on her behalf, but that she didn’t tell anyone else about the alleged attack until 2018, when she began work on her book. After Carroll went public with the story, Trump lashed out, calling her a liar and saying she wasn’t “my type”—which Carroll testified she interpreted to mean she was “too ugly to rape.” She sued him for defamation, but the case got bogged down in arguments over whether Trump was protected from the lawsuit because of his role as president. But when he repeated his comments in November 2022, Carroll filed a new lawsuit.
Trump did not attend the trial, and his attorney, Joe Tacopina, presented no witnesses on his behalf. But in both his opening and closing statements, Tacopina aggressively accused Carroll of lying, saying she was trying to harm Trump’s political fortunes and make herself a celebrity. The jury disagreed.