Government

Trump Says Carroll Verdict Must Be Overturned Because Jurors Didn't Hear The POSITIVE Side Of Being Slandered By The President

Tacopina strikes again.

By  
on
donald-trump-thumbs-up-happy

(Photo by Ali Shaker/VOA)

After a jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his lawyers blitzed the airways to praise their glorious victory.

Joseph Tacopina, after netting a $5 million verdict against his client, emphasized that the jury had not found Trump liable for rape. And Alan Dershowitz downplayed the verdict, saying that the case should be overturned since the jury only faulted the former president for “kinda molesting” the plaintiff.

In point of fact, the jury found that Carroll was unable to testify conclusively if Trump had forcibly penetrated her with his penis, or just his fingers. Nevertheless, the MAGA minions have tried to spin this a refutation of Carroll’s entire claim which undermines not just Carroll II, the 2022 case arising out of Trump’s later defamatory comments and the sexual battery allegations, but also Carroll I, the earlier case based on his 2019 attack on the plaintiff. Immediately after the verdict in Carroll II, her lawyers sought to amend the complaint to change the word “rape” to “sexual assault.” Trump’s lawyers oppose the motion, accusing Carroll of seeking “capitalize on the favorable aspect of the ruling while minimizing the impact of the adverse portion.”

We’re still awaiting a ruling from Judge Lewis Kaplan on that motion, but in the meantime, Trump’s lawyers have filed a motion for new trial or remittitur in Carroll II, demanding that the court either reverse the jury verdict, or at least reduce the amount of the award under Rule 59.

The reasons for this are, ummm, creative.

First, Trump argues that his defamatory statements could not have damaged Carroll, since the only people who believed them were Republicans, and they would have hated her anyway:

Sponsored

Plaintiff’s evidence as to the amount of people who believed the October 12, 2022 Statement (and thus thought less of Plaintiff) was based upon pure conjecture, because (i) according to Plaintiff, the people who read and believed the October 12, 2022 Statement were republicans [sic] who consistently believed Defendant, and (ii) such individuals likely would have disbelieved Plaintiff’s rape accusation regardless of the October 12, 2022 Statement, especially since Defendant already denied Plaintiff’s accusations by way of his June 2019 Statements;

Then he likened Carroll’s claim of inability to maintain emotional or sexual relationships after the assault to loss of spousal consortium, and demanded that the jury award be reduced to something less than $500,000.

Trump went on to suggest that the jury must have been confused and aggregated the impact between the time in 2019 when Trump slagged Carroll, and the time in 2022 when he did it again. (As differentiated from the times in 2023 when he repeated the allegations during the CNN Townhall.)

However, Plaintiff never distinguished the harm caused by the June 2019 Statements and the October 12, 2022 Statement. Therefore, the jury award for the purported harm caused by the October 12, 2022 Statement is based upon pure speculation, and the jury very clearly must have awarded Plaintiff compensatory damages for the alleged harms caused by the June 2019 Statements, namely the alleged loss of reputation and her job, as well as receiving death threats.

Trump’s lawyers presented no case at all, and their expert witness failed to show up at trail. Nonetheless they attack Carroll’s expert post-verdict and argue that she misled the jury by failing to testify about all the wonderful things that happened to Carroll after the sitting president called her a liar and implied she was too ugly to sexually assault.

Sponsored

Tenth, Professor Humphreys also testified that she did not analyze any of Plaintiff’s numerous media appearances where Plaintiff enhanced her reputation with regard to her allegations against Defendant. In fact, Plaintiff conceded that she received a vast amount of positive support from the public after making her accusation against Defendant. Even though Professor Humphreys admitted that Plaintiff received positive support from the public after the rape allegation, she did not factor such support into her analysis of the harm allegedly caused by the October 12, 2022 Statement. Accordingly, her analysis of reputational harm is pure speculation.

They also pounce on Carroll’s admission that she is making “slightly more” after getting fired from her position as the longtime advice columnist at Elle magazine by doing “ten times the work” to produce her Substack column.

And this guy has the nerve to call women “nasty” …

Carroll v. Trump I [Docket via Court Listener]
Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

, , , ,