Trump loses bid for new trial in E. Jean Carroll case

NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday denied Donald Trump’s bid for a new trial two months after a jury found that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.

In his motion for a new trial, Trump argued that because the jury found him liable for sexual abuse but not rape, which is what Carroll originally alleged, the jury award of $2 million in compensatory damages for the sexual abuse claim was excessive.

He also argued that the jury award of $2.7 million in compensatory damages for the defamation claim should be reduced, largely because he disputed the testimony of an expert witness on which it was based. And Trump said an additional punitive damages award of $228,000 violated his constitutional right to due process.

Carroll alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a luxury Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. She testified during the trial that he penetrated her with his fingers, but she said she couldn’t be certain that he had inserted his penis because he was pressed up against her in a way that blocked her view.

In a 59-page decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that “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.”

He said that the former president’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.”

“The jury in this case did not reach ‘a seriously erroneous result,’” he wrote. “Its verdict is not ‘a miscarriage of justice.’”

Separate from his motion for a new trial, Trump is also contesting the verdict before a federal appeals court. That appeal remains pending.

Carroll, meanwhile, has a separate defamation lawsuit pending against Trump. The trial over that lawsuit is scheduled for January 2024.

On Wednesday, a lawyer for Carroll, Robbie Kaplan, said, “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” at trial. She added that Carroll “also looks forward to continuing to hold Trump accountable” at next year’s trial.

A lawyer for Trump, Joe Tacopina, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.