2024-01-27 03:01:00
The former president of the United States, Donald Trump, was found guilty this Friday of defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, for which he must pay her compensation of 83.3 million dollars, according to the North American Justice Department. Hours before, the magnate left the courtroom where he was being tried, just at the moment when the latter’s lawyer was speaking.
The lawyer Roberta Kaplan had been speaking for just five minutes in her closing statement and when she was proclaiming that Justice is equal for everyone, Trump stood up with a serious face and without saying a word, left the room. The judge presiding over the case, Lewis Kaplan, indicated that he should record in the minutes that the defendant had left the courtroom.
The mogul then wrote on his Truth Social network to complain that Kaplan had refused to admit numerous things at trial that supposedly exonerated him. Among those materials that the judge did not admit in the process, he mentioned an interview by the writer on CNN four years ago where she indicated “rape is sexy,” Trump said, although the truth is that her words were these: ” “I think most people think rape is sexy.”
For the former president, this shows that the judge “is an extremely abusive individual, something never seen before, and has turned the trial into a unilateral trial, where one party is allowed everything and the other nothing.”
The case
In this trial, the favorite in the Republican primaries was responding to accusations of defaming the writer when he assured, in 2019, that he did not know her and that her statement – made that same year – that the former president had sexually abused her was false. her.
Last May, a jury convicted the former president of sexual abuse, as well as defamation and to pay an amount of 5 million dollars. In this case, the jury could only decide whether Trump damaged Carroll’s reputation with his 2019 comments and how much he should pay in that case.
Despite the jury’s decision in 2023, Trump continues to deny in his press conferences and in his comments on social networks that he ever met Carroll. And he says that it is all a farce and a witch hunt, as in all cases in which it is investigated. On Thursday, when the jury was not yet in the room, Trump ignored the judge’s instructions to say once again: “I don’t know this woman, I never met her.”
Damaged reputation
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, pointed out this Friday that for a man as attached to money as Trump, the only way to deter him from continuing his attacks against Carroll is if he has to face paying an “unusually high” amount of punitive damages. “. She also asked for $24 million in compensatory damages to repair her client’s reputation and compensate her for the emotional harm she caused him.
In this trial, Carroll’s legal team argued that after the comments made by the then president, the journalist lost her credibility as a columnist – for years she has given her advice to readers in Elle magazine – as well as her versatility, since that now the media only contacts her to talk about the former president. She also indicated that she began to be harassed by his followers. Carroll pointed out that the day Trump denied her accusations, she received emails that threatened her with death, but that she deleted them because it was her first instinct, so she could not provide that data as evidence.
Trump’s defense maintains that when Carroll decided to make Trump’s sexual harassment public, her career and popularity as a columnist and writer had already deteriorated, and precisely she took off again as a result of her accusations against the millionaire, which gave her more followers and fame.
Trump faces four other criminal cases: two for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election in which he lost against Joe Biden; one for taking classified documents from the White House to his Florida residence; and one related to payments to porn actress Stromy Daniels to hide an old affair.
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