A federal court judge in New York on Wednesday denied Donald Trump’s bid for a new trial on E. Jean Carroll’s civil sexual assault and defamation claims against the former president.
In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan also denied Trump’s request to reduce the $5 million in damages a jury awarded Carroll earlier this year.
Kaplan wrote that Trump’s arguments that the $2 million she was awarded on the sexual assault was “excessive” is “entirely unpersuasive.”
“There is no basis for disturbing the jury’s sexual assault damages. And Mr. Trump’s arguments with respect to the defamation damages are no stronger,” Kaplan wrote.
An attorney for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The former president has denied assaulting Carroll and has a separate appeal of the verdict pending.
Trump’s argument for a new trial or reduced award centered on the nine-member jury’s finding in May that Carroll, 79, had not proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that Trump had raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. The jury did find Trump liable on another element of Carroll’s battery claim: sexual abuse.
Trump’s lawyers contended that finding could have been based on allegations including “groping of Plaintiff’s breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape,” and that the damages award was therefore excessive.
Kaplan called that argument “frivolous” because there was “no evidence whatever that Mr. Trump groped Ms. Carroll’s breasts, through her clothing or otherwise.”
The magazine writer testified that Trump’s only sexual contact with her was when he penetrated her with his fingers and then his penis.
“The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her,” and the damages are therefore not excessive, the judge wrote.
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Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement that her client “looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her.”
“She also looks forward to continuing to hold Trump accountable for what he did to her at the trial” for another civil defamation case against Trump that’s scheduled to begin in January of next year.
That case involves statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president and after the $5 million jury verdict, including calling her claims a financially motivated “hoax.”
Trump, meanwhile, has filed a counterclaim against Carroll alleging she defamed him by continuing to say he raped her in public statements after the jury verdict.
In his ruling Wednesday, Kaplan indicated that may be a losing argument.
He noted that rape in New York criminal law “applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis,” a definition that is “far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” he wrote.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
