By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Donald Trump can not argue to a jury assessing damages on the author E. Jean Carroll‘s upcoming defamation trial that he didn’t rape her within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, based mostly on one other jury having discovered that he solely sexually abused her, a U.S. decide has dominated.
In an order on Saturday evening, U.S. District Choose Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan granted Carroll’s request to dam the protection from arguing that the jury reached its conclusion as a result of it didn’t imagine Carroll’s rape declare.
The jury final Might ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million over their alleged encounter in a Bergdorf Goodman division retailer dressing room, which Trump says by no means occurred, and for defaming her in 2022.
Within the scheduled Jan. 16 trial, a unique jury will take into account how a lot Trump ought to pay Carroll for defaming her in 2019, when he was nonetheless president and the previous Elle journal columnist mentioned the encounter in her memoir.
Trump’s attorneys mentioned the primary jury’s discovering undermined Carroll’s declare that he acted with malice by sustaining that he didn’t know Carroll, 80, and that she concocted the rape declare to promote her guide.
However the decide mentioned the jury’s discovering that Trump forcibly and with out consent penetrated Carroll’s vagina made her rape declare “considerably true underneath widespread fashionable parlance,” even when it didn’t match the definition of rape underneath New York legislation.
Kaplan mentioned it will waste time for jurors on the upcoming trial to think about how Trump penetrated Carroll, when the one difficulty is damages for defamation.
Trump’s attorneys and a spokeswoman didn’t instantly reply on Monday to requests for remark.
Carroll is looking for $10 million in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages. She is predicted to testify, and Trump is a doable trial witness.
Trump is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
He has pleaded not responsible to 91 prison costs in 4 indictments, together with two instances claiming he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The case is Carroll v. Trump, U.S. District Courtroom, Southern District of New York, No. 20-07311.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Enhancing by Howard Goller)
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