In challenging the jury’s multimillion-dollar award for writer E. Jean Carroll as excessive, Donald Trump’s legal team noted that the jury had found Trump liable in May for sexual abuse but not rape.
Batting away that challenge, the federal judge who handled the case explained why the distinction doesn’t help the former president.
Moving for a new trial and trying to lower the damages, Trump’s legal team had argued that the “purported sexual abuse found by the Jury could have only included alleged groping of Plaintiffs intimate parts through clothing, which is clearly not rape.”
Dismissing Trump’s argument as “entirely unpersuasive,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in an opinion Wednesday that the Manhattan jury hadn’t awarded Carroll millions in damages “for groping her breasts through her clothing, wrongful as that might have been.”
Rather, Kaplan wrote, “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.”
The federal judge admonished Trump’s team for focusing on the narrower definition of “rape” under New York criminal law (which applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis) as opposed to its more commonly understood use and what the jury found Trump actually did.
That commonsense distinction led Kaplan to reject Trump’s motion, a move that the former president is appealing to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in his legal attack on the jury’s $5 million award.
As my colleague Steve Benen pointed out, this was only the latest legal loss for Trump, arriving alongside his failed long-shot challenge to his Georgia criminal investigation and his similarly failed quest to move his New York criminal case from state court to federal court. Putting aside Trump’s mounting criminal troubles, this isn’t even the only Carroll case that Trump could lose. Her other defamation lawsuit against him is set for trial in January. Ahead of that trial, which will include remarks Trump made about Carroll in 2019 when he was president, he lost an important defense earlier this month, when the federal government said it no longer held the strange view that he should be immune for having made statements in the course of his official duties. Like Judge Kaplan’s extinguishing of the rape/sexual abuse distinction, the reversal was another commonsense loss for the former president.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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