- E. Jean Carroll’s second trial against Donald Trump, in January 2024, will only cover damages.
- An earlier jury already settled that Trump raped Carroll, a judge ruled.
- Carroll’s other pending lawsuit, over statements Trump made as president, was mired in courts.
A federal judge granted E. Jean Carroll a major victory in her remaining lawsuit against Donald Trump, concluding the former president raped her and a jury only needs to determine how much money he should pay her in damages.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the question of whether Trump raped Carroll was settled in a separate trial earlier this year. A jury needed only to weigh how much he damaged her when he called her a liar in 2019 when he falsely denied her accusations, Kaplan wrote in a summary judgement ruling.
Trump is scheduled to sit for the second trial in January 2024 in Manhattan federal court. Because it is a civil case, he won’t need to attend the trial in person, which will occur during the heat of the Republican presidential race, where he remains the frontrunner.
In May, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages following a monthlong trial.
That trial was for Carroll’s second lawsuit against Trump. It was filed in late 2022, under a New York law passed in the wake of the #MeToo movement that allowed sexual assault accusers to bring legal claims that would otherwise be barred under the statute of limitations.
Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019. That year, she publicly accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s. Trump denied the claims, called her a liar and left-wing operative, and declared she was “not my type” — triggering the lawsuit.
That initial lawsuit had been mired in courts for years over legal questions of whether Trump made the statements in his capacity as US president, which would immunize him.
In July, the Justice Department said it had changed its position and concluded Trump’s statements were “related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades prior to Mr. Trump’s Presidency.”
“That sexual assault was obviously not job-related,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote in a court filing at the time.
Trump sought to have Carroll’s remaining lawsuit dismissed and countersued Carroll, saying that the jury found Trump sexually abused Carroll, but not that he raped her, as she originally claimed.
Kaplan, who is overseeing the two lawsuits, previously ruled that Carroll calling Trump a “rapist” made sense in the plain meaning of the word.
The jury used the New York state penal law standard to determine whether Trump “raped” or “sexually abused” Carroll. The difference, Kaplan told jurors in the first trial, is that “rape” means “any penetration of the penis into the vaginal opening” while “sexual abuse” means “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person for the purpose of gratifying the sexual desire of either person.”
“Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law,” Kaplan wrote in his new ruling.
Trump is appealing the verdict in the earlier Carroll trial and has argued that a second trial would be unfairly duplicative.
Kaplan said that the second trial would be limited to statements Trump made about Carroll in 2019, not the statements he made in 2022 that were the subject of the first trial.
“I have considered Mr. Trump’s other arguments and found them all unpersuasive,” Kaplan wrote.
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