E Jean Carroll to testify in second defamation trial against Donald Trump

E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against Donald Trump continues Wednesday morning in Manhattan federal court, with the start of witness testimony.

Carroll, a former Elle columnist, is suing Trump over his June 2019 denials of her rape claim against him. This trial will determine damages and Carroll is expected to take the stand herself today.

This week’s proceedings mark Carroll’s second defamation trial against Trump. In May a jury found the former US president liable of sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carroll $5m in damages.

Trump attended jury selection in the trial. He left the courthouse around 2pm for a campaign event in New Hampshire and was not present for opening statements.

Carroll said that Trump raped her almost three decades ago, in the changing room of an upscale Manhattan department store. She came forward with her account in 2019 when an excerpt from her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, ran in New York magazine.

Trump, who was in the White House when Carroll’s claim surfaced, quickly attacked, saying: “I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.” Carroll sued him in 2019, maintaining that Trump’s denials smeared her reputation, sparking online abuse and serious threats.

Carroll was not able to sue Trump for sexual assault as the incident fell outside the civil statute of limitations. But in 2022, New York state’s Adult Survivors Act gave adult victims of sexual misconduct a one-year window to sue their abusers for incidents outside this statute of limitations.

Carroll sued him once again, this time citing sexual assault and defamation claims for statements Trump made when he was no longer president. Judge Lewis Kaplan determined the key facts in that case would be accepted in this second trial – Trump can’t re-litigate Carroll’s rape claim.

Kaplan, in his instructions to jurors before opening statements, made this clear.

“Facts that were definitively decided in the previous trial include the following: first, Mr Trump, in fact, sexually abused Ms Carroll by forcibly and without her consent inserting his fingers into her vagina. Second, Mr Trump’s June 21 and June 22 statements were false. Ms Carroll did not make up her claim of forceable sexual abuse,” Kaplan said.

“And because you must accept them as true,” Kaplan later said, “this trial is not a do-over of the previous trial which determined those facts. What remains for you to decide are only two very limited issues relating to damages for Mr Trump’s publication of those two statements.”

Shawn Crowley, one of Carroll’s attorneys, said in her opening that jurors needed to impose damages that would stop Trump from continuing to smear her client.

“He is continuing to tell these lies to this very day – earlier this month, last week, even today. You will hear that as Donald Trump faces trial over how much money it will take to get him to stop defaming Ms Carroll, he keeps doing it. He sat in this courthouse. You saw him,” Crowley said.

“And while he was sitting there, he posted more defamatory statements, more lies about Ms Carroll and this case. By our count, by our last count, 22 posts, just today,” she said. “Think about that. Think about that when you consider how much money it will take to get him to stop.”

“At the end of this trial, it will be your job to decide how much money Donald Trump should pay for what he’s done to Ms Carroll, and how much money he should pay, it will take, to get him to stop defaming her, so that Ms Carroll can maybe, finally, live her life in peace,” Crowley said.

“We submit that that number should be significant. Very significant. Donald Trump, after all, is a self-proclaimed billionaire.”

Trump’s lead attorney on this case, Alina Habba, contended that Carroll was responsible for the backlash against her.

“Ms Carroll had a duty to minimize the effect of the statements, not exacerbate them, as I will show she did when she ignored that duty and did the exact opposite and still does today,” Habba claimed.

She also insisted that Carroll liked the life she was living following Trump’s denials.

“The evidence will show that Ms Carroll has made Trump the focal point of her new identity now. We will show that she frequently promoted and publicized every development with her first lawsuit against him herself,” Habba claimed. “She doesn’t want to fix her reputation, ladies and gentlemen. She likes her new brand.”