E Jean Carroll and Donald Trump (l-r: AP Photos by Seth Wenig and Evan Vucci)
Former President Donald Trump's effort to land a retrial on the $5 million verdict against him for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll received heavy mockery from his courtroom opponent on Thursday.
"Trump's motion is nothing more than his latest effort to obfuscate the import of the jury's verdict by engaging in his own particular Trump-branded form of magical thinking," attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in a scathing, 27-page legal brief. "Once again, Trump has the nerve to claim public vindication from the jury in this case when, in fact, the jury determined that he penetrated Carroll's vagina with his fingers without her consent and then defamed her last year."
In early May, a federal jury in New York quickly found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s — and then defamed her when she stepped forward with her story decades later. Deliberations took fewer than three hours, and their award was a hefty one.
Though a decisive victory for Carroll, it was not an unmitigated one. The "Ask E. Jean" columnist had filed suit under New York's Adult Survivors Act, and the sexual battery claim allowed jurors to decide on different levels of abuse. They declined to find that Trump raped Carroll, though she repeatedly accused him of that on the witness stand and in public interviews.
Trump's lead attorney Joe Tacopina latched onto the discrepancy in his bid for a new trial, arguing that the verdict was inconsistent and the award too high. In his motion, Tacopina noted that sexual abuse encompasses behavior that's a "far cry from rape," like groping Carroll's breasts through clothing.
Kaplan noted that this wasn't a version of events that the jury heard.
"The word 'breast' was not used a single time during Carroll's testimony, in contrast to the word 'vagina,' which was used repeatedly," her legal brief states states. "The latter was a focus of Carroll's cross-examination, during which Trump's counsel pressed Carroll on the difference between 'rummaging around [her] vagina' and 'inserting a finger inside [it].'"
Carroll's counsel argued that "Trump cannot now demand that damages be based on some imaginary version of events in which he did nothing more than touch Carroll's breast through her dress."
Trump has had a rough time inside the courtroom of Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who rejected most of his pretrial motions and repeatedly accused the former president of trying to delay his reckoning. The judge empaneled an anonymous jury in light of Trump's attacks on the legal system and dressed down his legal team so frequently that they requested a mistrial.
Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner predicted that Trump would have an equally tough row to hoe now that the trial is over.
"Judge Kaplan has not been fertile ground for any of the prior motions made by Donald Trump and his attorneys, and I would be very surprised if this motion was granted in any request," Epner said.
At the lower end of his request, Trump argues that the jury's award should be lowered to an amount "no more than" $400,000 on the sexual battery claim, $100,000 on the defamation claim, $368,000 for repairing Carroll's reputation, and $50,000 in punitive damages.
That would dramatically reduce Carroll's award from $5 million to just less than $1 million: $918,000.
Read the legal brief here.
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