Donald Trump suffered a variety of important legal setbacks after losing his re-election bid four years ago, but among the most important were E. Jean Carroll cases against him. As regular readers no doubt recall, it was last year when a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, and jurors awarded the writer $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.
The jury did not find the defendant liable for rape, though a judge later concluded that the jurors’ 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.’”
This was not, however, the final word on the subject. Trump also faced a second defamation trial, stemming from comments he made about Carroll in 2019, and he lost that case, too.
As a political matter, the outcomes did not derail his campaign — Trump managed to win a second term anyway — but as a legal matter, the relevance of Carroll’s allegations did not fade away. Indeed, as recently as the weekend, Trump used his social media platform to amplify an item suggesting his accuser might belong “in jail” for “falsely accusing” him of rape.
Part of the problem with this is the fact that every jury who has considered Carroll’s claims has sided with her against Trump. Making the problem worse is the fact that Trump’s appeals aren’t going well, either. Reuters reported:
A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a $5 million verdict that E. Jean Carroll won against Donald Trump when a jury found the U.S. president-elect liable for sexually abusing and later defaming the former magazine columnist. … The May 2023 verdict stemmed from an incident around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan, where Carroll said Trump raped her, and an October 2022 Truth Social post where Trump denied Carroll’s claim as a hoax.
NBC News has confirmed the developments.
As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained in September, Trump’s legal defense team sought a new trial, claiming that improper evidence was included in the initial civil case. That pitch proved unpersuasive to a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan. “We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the federal appellate bench concluded. “Further, he has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial.” Despite the juries’ findings, Trump has long insisted that he did nothing wrong, adding on multiple occasions that his accuser isn’t his “type.” It’s possible that the president-elect and his attorneys will appeal their latest setback to the U.S. Supreme Court, though there’s no reason to assume the justices will take up the case. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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