Former President Trump rages against the E. Jean Carroll sex abuse verdict in a series of Rumble videos posted on Truth Social. (Screenshot from social media)
Before a full 24 hours has passed, former President Donald Trump has posted nearly a dozen times on Truth Social about his $5 million defeat in the E. Jean Carroll sex-abuse verdict. Three of those posts are videos. Five are all-caps screeds. They’re filled with spin, lies and pure whoppers.
Using the same platform that sparked his defamation liabilities, Trump raged in the immediate wake of the civil judgment. He raged throughout the evening. He raged three times after midnight. Then, presumably after getting some sleep, Trump woke up in the morning and raged again.
‘NO IDEA’
As he fired off these missives, Trump activated his caps-lock button.
“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS,” the former president shouted mere minutes after jury cast its judgment. “THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
That was the first of 11 messages posted on Truth Social about the jury’s findings by press time, and it began with a proposition that’s become increasingly impossible to believe. Trump was photographed with “THIS WOMAN,” Carroll, decades ago, engaged in lively conversation with her and their respective spouses.
This photograph of Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll at a party was embedded in her complaint.
In the picture, Trump is facing Carroll and her then-husband John Johnson, as his then-wife Ivana Trump looks toward him. That’s the image in which Donald Trump, in a mix-up that may have cost him millions, mistook Carroll with his ex-wife Marla Maples in a video deposition. Caught in the gaffe, Trump claimed that the photograph was “blurry.” It is sharp and clear.
Even assuming, as Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina argued to a jury, Trump’s encounter with Carroll at the photographed event was fleeting, unremarkable, and not memorable, the former president’s insistence that he doesn’t know Carroll still strains credulity. Certainly, Trump knows her now, and there’s public evidence to suggest he would have recognized her then.
A longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, Carroll briefly had a program on the short-lived network America’s Talking, whose president was Trump’s friend Roger Ailes. As the jury learned, Ailes chatted with Trump on that network, and if Trump watched his own interview, he likely would have seen the show before it: “Ask E. Jean.” Carroll testified that Trump recognized her when she left the Bergdorf Goodman back in the mid-1990s.
“Hey, you’re that advice lady,” Trump said, according to Carroll.
From the start, Trump’s denials of Carroll’s allegations gave no inch: As Trump told it, he didn’t know Carroll; she wasn’t his type; and he rarely if ever even entered Bergdorf Goodman. The trial made all three of those propositions difficult to swallow. On the last point, Trump apparently had been such a memorable presence at Bergdorf that two of the store’s former executives testified that they saw him there. He lived across the street from the store.
On Truth Social, Trump continues to live in a trial-free vacuum, repeating at least four other times, in videos and in writing, that he doesn’t know Carroll, whom a jury determined was likely his sexual abuse survivor.
‘Terrible person, completely biased’
Before the trial began, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered that the jury would be anonymous in light of Trump’s lengthy history of attacking law enforcement, judges, and jurors on social media. The former president remained true to form on that front.
“This Clinton appointed Judge, Lewis Kaplan, hated President Donald J. Trump more than is humanly possible,” Trump wrote. “He is a terrible person, completely biased, and should have RECUSED himself when asked to do so. He quickly refused!”
Though much of his statement here is an opinion, Trump makes a factually false claim: Neither of the dockets in Carroll’s lawsuits shows a motion to recuse, and one doesn’t appear to have been adjudicated. The former president may have mistaken the nonexistent recusal request with Tacopina’s failed bid for a mistrial, which described some of Kaplan’s rulings as “unfair.”
Not content with swiping at the judge, Trump then slammed the jury.
“The partisan Judge & Jury on the just concluded Witch Hunt Trial should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for allowing such a travesty of Justice to take place,” Trump railed in a separate post.
From the media diets of the nine jurors, it’s clear this wasn’t a panel of left-wing partisans. They were certainly culled from a handful of predominantly liberal New York counties, but the diverse jurors — comprised of six men and three women — hailed from different backgrounds and tastes. One disclosed during voir dire that he was a fan of right-wing podcaster Tim Pool.
Later in the same post, Trump grumbled about evidentiary disputes.
“The ‘Dress,’ which played such a big roll [sic] early on as a threatening bluff, but which ended up being totally exculpatory, was not allowed into the trial as evidence,” Trump wrote, referring to Carroll’s original quest to obtain his DNA. “Nor was her cat’s name, ‘Vagina,’ the racist name she called her Black husband, ‘Ape,’ getting caught in a lie on the political operative paying for this Hoax, & much more!”
In this post, Trump is generally talking about evidence Judge Kaplan barred from trial. Carroll initially sought Trump’s genetic material to compare it with any residue found on the dress. Trump resisted that request for years, and once he hired Tacopina, he made a sudden about-face on the eve of trial. He suddenly offered to provide his DNA, if Carroll would provide missing pages from a genetic report his defense team wanted.
Evidentiary disputes are governed by legal obligations, not bartering, and Judge Kaplan rejected Trump’s request as a “quid pro quo.” Carroll’s legal team called Trump’s 11th-hour reversal a delay tactic to postpone the trial, and the judge ultimately agreed.
On Carroll’s colorful pet name — and the incendiary term she once used for her ex-husband — it’s hard to imagine how that information would have helped a jury determine whether Trump sexually abused her in the mid-1990s. And the judge found those topics irrelevant. Carroll testified about her tumultuous marriage to Johnson, a Black TV news anchor. She was candid about her racially loaded insult toward Johnson in “What Do We Need Men For,” the same book in which she first revealed her allegations against Trump. The judge left out the remark as too inflammatory to put before a diverse New York-based jury.
If discrediting a witness for a racially inflammatory comment were generally permitted in court, Trump — who began his 2016 campaign by suggesting Mexicans are “rapists,” used a slur to describe Japanese people, and has spoken broadly about laziness in “the Blacks” — probably wouldn’t be the beneficiary of such a rule.
‘Rape is sexy’
As he did in his deposition, Trump misrepresented an interview Carroll gave with CNN’S Anderson Cooper in a separate post.
“After listening to the Anderson Cooper tape of the Carroll interview where she said ‘rape is sexy,’ and other totally incriminating things, it is not possible to believe that this woman, who I do not know and have never met before (except on a crowded celebrity photo line), could be credible or convincing to a Judge & Jury,” Trump wrote.
Trump’s quotation chops out most of Carroll’s sentence and, in the process, completely changes its meaning.
“I think most people think rape is sexy,” Carroll said, referring to people’s “fantasies.”
In the clip, Carroll’s exchange with Cooper in the interview was no doubt awkward, and the host quickly shifted to a commercial break. Trump made sure to note that in his post, but he also contorts her words to score a point. Carroll elaborated at trial that she was referring to the commodification of rape in shows like “Game of Thrones” and movies like “The Fountainhead.”
In any event, CNN’s interview with Carroll doesn’t seem to have soured Trump to the network.
After his string of rage posts about Carroll, Trump boasted about his upcoming town hall on CNN, where he’s likely to be asked about the jury’s findings that he sexually abused and defamed Carroll. It will air at 8 p.m. ET.
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