NEW YORK (AP) — A judge said Saturday that former President Donald Trump’s lawyers cannot make legal arguments before a jury assessing damages in a defamation trial over a jury’s finding last year that that he did not rape a columnist in the mid-1990s.
District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan made the determination in a Jan. 6 pretrial order determining defamation damages against Trump after a jury concluded that Trump sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll, but found no that the evidence was sufficient to conclude that he raped her.
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Trump, speaking Saturday in Iowa as the Republican front-runner ahead of the Jan. 15 primary, called the judge a radical Democrat and mocked Carroll for not screaming when she was attacked. “It was all made up,” he said.
Carroll, 80, won $5 million in damages in May after a jury found that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1996 in the locker room of a luxury department store and defamed her in 2022.
Trump did not attend the trial in Manhattan where Carroll testified that a chance encounter at the Bergdorf Goodman store on the other side of Trump Tower was flirtatious and fun until he slammed her into a wall in a locker room and sexually assaulted her. Trump has vehemently denied it.
At this month’s trial, a jury will consider whether or not damages should be imposed against Trump for comments he made at the verdict last year and in 2019 while he was president and after Carroll spoke publicly for the first time since his statements from the mid-nineties in his memoirs.
Carroll’s lawyers asked the judge to issue the order and said Trump’s lawyers should not be allowed to confuse jurors this month about last year’s verdict by trying to argue that the jury did not believe Carroll’s rape claim.
2024-01-08 04:16:46
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