The day after his clear electoral victory in Iowa and before a key vote in New Hampshire, Donald Trump appeared Tuesday in New York civil court for a second defamation lawsuit filed by an author who had already had him convicted of sexual assault in the 1990s.
More than ever a favorite in the Republican primaries after easily winning the Midwest state caucus on Monday, the former President of the United States, 77, kept his word and went as announced to the Manhattan courthouse to face the former columnist of the American magazine She Elizabeth Jean Carroll, 80 years old.
According to the judicial press which had access to the courtroom, the two protagonists did not exchange a glance during the day, devoted to the selection of a civil jury of nine people.
AFP journalists saw the New York businessman’s convoy of black limousines leave the courthouse around 3 p.m.
“Barely believable”
If Mr. Trump remained silent in court, he attacked Mr.me Carroll on his social network Truth Social: “It’s hard to believe that I have to defend myself against this woman’s bogus story,” he wrote, republishing old excerpts from TV interviews and messages on the social networks of his accuser.
“I have never seen this woman in my life. (…) I have no idea who she is,” Donald Trump reaffirmed last week about the writer, continuing to call her a liar or “crazy”, despite her resounding civil conviction last May to pay him five million dollars for sexual assault in 1996 and defamation in 2022.
Targeted by at least six civil and criminal trials, the real estate mogul has transformed each of his indictments or appearances into a political platform, multiplying virulent invectives against judges, prosecutors and the Democratic camp of President Joe Biden, whom he accuses of wanting to prevent him from winning the presidential election in November.
“It’s not me they’re targeting. It’s you,” he proclaims in capital letters on his website, addressing his supporters.
The trial is expected to last several days, but will be limited in substance and time, because Mr. Trump has already been declared responsible for the acts alleged by Mr.me Carroll.
On May 9, 2023, a jury in the same federal civil court in Manhattan unanimously decided that he had committed a “sexual assault” on E. Jean Carroll in 1996 in a fitting room of a new department store. yorker and that he had also defamed her in October 2022.
The jurors sentenced Donald Trump, who appealed and was never criminally prosecuted in this case, to five million dollars in damages.
Rape
Butme Carroll also filed a defamation suit for prior statements by Donald Trump in June 2019, following his first rape accusations contained in a book.
Then President of the United States (2017-2021), he claimed that the author, who was “not his type”, had invented everything to “sell a new book”. The proceedings had been delayed by procedural battles, but a second trial was still scheduled.
A sign of the tensions surrounding Donald Trump’s trials, Judge Lewis Kaplan (who is not related to Mr. Trump’s lawyerme Carroll, Roberta Kaplan) imposed anonymity on the jurors. He also warned “that the only issue at stake at trial will be the harm caused to Mme Carroll by the comments” which he already considers “defamatory”, “false” and “malicious”.
E. Jean Carroll is seeking at least ten million dollars in damages for her moral and professional harm.
In the middle of the primary campaign, the trial will once again raise the question of the behavior towards women of Donald Trump, accused several times of sexual assault, but never criminally convicted.