By Aaron Miller-
A federal judge has dismissed Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E Jean Carroll.
Mr Trump was ordered to pay $5m (£3.9m) in damages, which he argued was excessive based on the jury’s verdict.
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In June, Manhattan prosecutors charged the former president with 34 counts of falsifying business records, alleging an effort to silence news of Mr Trump’s alleged affairs as campaigned for the presidency in 2016. He has pleaded not guilty.
Kaplan rejected Trump’s motion Tuesday, calling that argument “entirely unpersuasive.”
“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,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
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He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
Kaplan also rejected Trump’s legal representative’s suggestion that the conduct Trump was found liable for might have been as limited as groping of the breasts.
“The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina,” Kaplan wrote, calling it the “only remaining conclusion.
“Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” Kaplan wrote.
He added that the jury clearly found that Trump had “ ‘raped’ her in the sense of that term broader than the New York Penal Law definition.
In a 59-page decision on Wednesday, US District judge Lewis Kaplan ruled the jury did not reach “a seriously erroneous result”, in calculating the amount of damages, as argued by Mr Trump’s lawyers, and dismissed his request for a new trial.
Judge Kaplan wrote that the trial evidence demonstrated Mr Trump “raped” Ms Carroll in the plain sense of the word.
“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’,” Judge Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Ms Carroll has sued Mr Trump for $10m (£7.7m) for statements he made in 2019 that she claims are defamatory.
Ms. Carroll’s first lawsuit which started in 2019 was delayed for years, with an additional claim which could not have been made in 2019 because the statute
of limitations almost doubtless would have expired long before.
The claim was revived in 2022 by the enactment that year of New York’s Adult Survivors Act which temporarily revived the ability of persons who were sexually assaulted as adults to sue their alleged assaulters despite the fact that an earlier statute of limitations had run out.
The US Justice Department initially ruled Mr Trump was legally immune from the lawsuit because he was president when he made the remarks.
However, earlier this month, government attorneys said they no longer had “sufficient basis” to conclude Mr Trump was acting within the scope of his duties as president.
Judge Kaplan’s ruling comes as former president Trump is facing a series of legal challenges, including a potential indictment over his alleged role in January 6 insurrection as well as criminal charges in New York related to a hush-money payment to a porn actress.
In the hush-money case, a New York judge delivered another loss for Mr Trump’s legal team on Wednesday rejecting the former president’s request to move an upcoming trial to federal court.
Mr Trump faces felony charges in New York for falsifying business records over a reimbursement he made to his lawyer for paying porn actress, Stormy Daniels.
He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and a trial is scheduled for March 2024.
Mr Trump argued the trial should be moved to federal court because the alleged crimes took place while he was president. But District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote in a filing that Mr Trump had failed to show his conduct was related to “any act performed by or for the President”
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