Donald Trump back in court for defamation in sexual assault case
The former US president attended the hearing in New York a day after landslide victory in Iowa caucus.
The morning after a victorious night in Iowa, Donald Trump was back in a New York courtroom for the selection of a jury that must decide how much he owes a woman who accused him of rape.
The former president, sitting a few rows behind his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, shook his head as Judge Lewis Kaplan explained to potential jurors that “for the purposes of this trial, it has been determined already that Mr Trump did sexually assault Ms Carroll”.
As Trump, 77, sat in the courtroom, where both he and his lawyers are subject to a ruling prohibiting them from denying this finding, a series of posts on his social media account denied her claims and called them “PURE FICTION”.
Carroll, 80, alleges that Trump raped her in a changing room at a New York department store in the mid-nineties. She sued him in 2019 after he denied the claims and declared that she had made up the story to sell a memoir.
The case is being heard eight months after a New York jury decided, in a civil case before the same judge, that Trump did sexually assault Carroll and defamed her in October 2022 when he denied it, awarding her $US5 million.
It did not find that Trump had raped Carroll, but Kaplan has ruled that because the jury did conclude that he sexually assaulted her with his fingers, her claim of rape was “substantially true”.
He said last week: “This trial will not be a ‘do over’ of the previous trial. The fact that Mr Trump sexually abused – indeed raped – Ms Carroll has been conclusively established.”
The jury must instead consider the question of the damage his statements did to Carroll, and Trump’s state of mind when he made them.
The judge has also ruled that if Trump gives evidence, he cannot claim that he thought he was being truthful in denying her claims.
As jury selection got under way on Tuesday, a post on Trump’s account on his social media platform at 8.46am declared that “after a historic win in Iowa, I am going to the Biden encouraged Witch Hunt in Lower Manhattan to fight against a FAKE Case from a woman I have never met, seen, or touched (Celebrity Lines don’t count!)”, the latter reference relating to a photograph shown during the first court case that shows Trump meeting Carroll.
“Can you believe I have to defend myself against this woman’s fake story?!” said another post, at 9.37am.
Another 16 posts followed in the next 10 minutes, linking to stories questioning Carroll’s motives and clips from interviews she gave suggesting that she had enjoyed the attention she received after accusing Trump of rape.
“The only right, honest, and lawful thing that Clinton-appointed Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has so far been unable to see clearly because of his absolute hatred of Donald J. Trump (ME!), can do is to end this unAmerican injustice,” said a post at 9.45am.
Trump told reporters last week, on the final day of a civil trial for fraud brought against him by Letitia James, the Democrat attorney-general of the state of New York, that he planned to attend the second Carroll trial “to explain I don’t know who the hell she is”.
Alina Habba, his lawyer, argued in a letter to the judge on Sunday that requiring him “to proffer his guilt, under oath, for acts that he maintains did not occur”, because of a finding in a civil court where jurors reach a decision on “a preponderance of evidence” rather than the higher standard required in a criminal court, would be a “manifest injustice”.
The Times
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