NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday upheld a $5 million jury verdict against Donald Trump, rejecting the former president’s claim that the price was excessive and that the jury justified it by not finding in the civil case that he raped a columnist in a luxury department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said the jury’s May award of compensatory and punitive damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation was reasonable.
Trump’s lawyers had asked Kaplan to reduce the jury award to less than $1 million or order a new trial for damages. In their arguments, the attorneys said the jury’s $2 million compensatory damages award for Carroll’s sexual assault claim was excessive because the jury found that Trump did not rape Carroll at the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the spring of 1996.
Kaplan wrote that the jury’s unanimous verdict was almost entirely in favor of Carroll, except that the jury found that she had failed to prove that Trump had raped her “in the narrow and technical sense of a particular section of New York criminal law.”
The judge said the section requires vaginal penetration by a penis while forcible penetration without consent of the vagina or other bodily orifices by fingers or anything else is labeled “sexual abuse” rather than “rape”.
He said the definition of rape was “much narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, because many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump did in fact do just that.”
Trump’s lawyers were correct in arguing that the $2 million award for sexual abuse would have been excessive if the jury had based the compensatory award on a finding that Trump fondled Carroll’s breasts through her clothes or similar conduct, the judge said. But, he said, that’s not what the jury found.
“There was no evidence of such conduct. Instead, the evidence established convincingly, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and lasting emotional and psychological damage,” Kaplan wrote.
The judge said Trump’s argument “ignored the bulk of the evidence at trial, misconstrued the jury’s verdict, and erroneously focused on New York’s criminal law definition of ‘rape’ to the exclusion of the meaning of that word as it is often used in daily life and evidence of what actually happened between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump.”
Lawyers for Trump, the front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, did not immediately comment after the judge’s ruling.
Attorney Robbie Kaplan, who represents Carroll and is not related to the judge, said in a statement: “Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to lower the verdict, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages the jury awarded her.”
The attorney said her client is also looking forward to a second defamation lawsuit against Trump scheduled for January. This claim is based on statements made by Trump while he was president and on statements he made after the trial.
Since the verdict in early May after a two-week trial, Trump has continued to claim he never met Carroll at the department store and did not know her until she claimed in a 2019 memoir that he raped her.
At trial, Carroll testified for three days, claiming that Trump sexually assaulted her in the downtown Manhattan store’s dressing room on a desolate floor near the lingerie section after they had a chance encounter at the store’s entrance and flirted with each other while shopping for an item of clothing for one of Trump’s friends. The store is located across from the Trump Tower.
Trump, 77, did not attend the trial. He said in a social media post last week that his attorneys “out of respect for the President’s office and disbelief of the case, did not want me to testify, or even be at trial…”.
After the trial, Carroll, 79, added new claims to an ongoing defamation claim and sought an additional $10 million in compensatory damages and significantly more in unspecified punitive damages.
Trump counterattacked Carroll, claiming he had been defamed when she continued to claim after the verdict that she had been raped.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll did.