Former U.S. President Donald Trump has suffered a legal setback for sexually abusing magazine writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and defaming her by branding her a liar, jurors ruled on Tuesday.
After three hours, the nine-member jury in Manhattan federal court awarded $5 million in compensation and punitive damages to Carroll. Although the finding of sexual abuse was enough to establish his liability for battery, the jury did not find that Trump raped her.
The judges rejected Trump’s denial that he assaulted Carroll. To find him liable, a jury of six men and three women was required to reach a unanimous verdict.
Although Trump was absent throughout the trial which began on April 25, Carroll held hands with her lawyers as the verdict was read.
Carroll, 79, testified during the civil trial that Trump, 76, raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan in either 1995 or 1996, then harmed her reputation by writing in an October 2022 post on his Truth Social platform that her claims were a “complete con job,” “a hoax” and “a lie.”
Former president Trump is the front-runner in opinion polls for the Republican presidential nomination and has shown an uncanny ability to weather controversies that might sink other politicians.
“The folks that are anti-Trump are going to remain that way, the core pro-Trump voters are not going to change, and the ambivalent ones I just don’t think are going to be moved by this type of thing,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.
Any negative impact is likely to be small and limited to suburban women and moderate Republicans, he said.
Jurors were tasked with deciding whether Trump raped, sexually abused or forcibly touched Carroll, any one of which would satisfy her claim of battery. They were separately asked if Trump defamed Carroll.
Trump faces no criminal consequences because this was a civil case. Carroll was seeking unspecified monetary damages.
Trump’s legal team opted not to present a defense, gambling that jurors would find that Carroll had failed to make a persuasive case.
Trump had said Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist and a registered Democrat, cooked up the allegations to try to increase sales of her 2019 memoir and to hurt him politically.
The trial featured testimony from two women who said Trump sexually assaulted them decades ago.