All Tuesday morning, former President Donald Trump used social media to attack writer E. Jean Carroll.
By Tuesday afternoon, it was part of the court record in her latest defamation trial against him.
An attorney for Carroll, Shawn Crowley, nodded to Trump’s diatribe in her opening statements as she told a panel of New York City jurors that Trump has publicly smeared her client ever since she came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
Carroll maintains that Trump raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a Manhattan department store, in the mid-1990s; he has denied any wrongdoing.
Her story is not at issue in the trial — rather, the jurors will need to decide how much Trump should pay for allegedly damaging her reputation.
“How much money will it take to make him stop?” Crowley reportedly said on Tuesday.
Trump’s incendiary remarks have not stopped “to this day, literally, to this day,” Crowley said, according to New York Daily News reporter Molly Crane-Newman. (Video cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.)
Among dozens of posts to his Truth Social website, Trump wrote, “It is my duty to America to right this egregious wrong, a case which was started based on no facts, no dates, no nothing, just fabricated lies and political shenanigans.” He also posted screenshots of old tweets in which Carroll mentioned sex or relationships.
Though Trump was seated in court behind Carroll for jury selection, he left for a presidential campaign event in New Hampshire before opening arguments commenced.
Crowley argued that Trump’s past comments have led to death threats and hateful remarks from his legions of supporters.
An attorney for the former president, Alina Habba, countered that Carroll’s star has only risen since she accused Trump.
A different jury decided last year that Trump was liable for the sexual abuse of Carroll. Though the jury did not find that Trump had raped her under the letter of the law, the judge in the current case, Lewis Kaplan, wrote that the rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”
In the previous case, which was brought under a New York state law allowing sexual assault survivors a brief window to file civil lawsuits against their attackers, jurors awarded Carroll $2 million for the sexual abuse finding and $3 million for Trump’s defamatory comments. Trump is now appealing that decision.
The current case was filed in 2019, but held up for years due to the Trump team’s legal maneuvering.
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
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