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E. Jean Carroll Beat Trump. Again.
As the cowards in Congress prostrate themselves, an 82-year-old woman took on the president and won.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s petition for certiorari in Trump v. Carroll with no noted dissents.
The 2023 jury verdict finding that Trump sexually abused and defamed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll is now final. The president is out of courts to shop this to, and he’ll get no more appeals. And since he had to prepay the judgment and deposit it with the court — along with interest! — Carroll won’t have to wait for him to cut the check.
Courtroom crazytimes
There were actually two Carroll v. Trump cases, and confusingly Carroll II went to trial first.
The first lawsuit was filed in 2019, after New York Magazine published an excerpt of Carroll’s book “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” in which she described being sexually assaulted in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s by the sitting president.
Trump went berserk, spewing a tirade of revolting abuse and accusing her of concocting the story with the help of prominent Democrats.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay?” he sneered.
His followers barraged Carroll with threats and harassment, and she lost her longtime gig at Elle magazine. On the witness stand, she described the avalanche of hate every time Trump tweeted about her:
Just a wave of slime. It was very seedy comments, very denigrating. Almost an endless stream of people repeating what Donald Trump says, I was a liar and I was in it for the money, can't wait for the payoff, working for the democrats, over and over. But the main thing was “way too ugly.” It is very hard to get up in the morning and face the fact that you're receiving these messages you are just too ugly to go on living, practically.
Carroll sued for defamation in New York state court in 2019, but, immediately after the judge ordered Trump to submit to a DNA test, Attorney General Bill Barr swooped in to substitute the federal government as the defendant in Carroll I under the Westfall Act. That law protects federal employees from liability for torts committed in the course of their official duties. And because you can’t sue the government for defamation, swapping in the United States as defendant would have meant the end of the case.
But Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York ruled that Trump had not been doing official president stuff when he said Carroll was “not my type” and implied she was too unattractive to assault. Then Trump spent the next two years arguing the point in multiple courts, only to find himself back in front of Judge Kaplan with the same answer in 2023. By that point the president and his lawyer Alina Habba had thoroughly pissed off Judge Kaplan with their antics and would probably have been delighted to find themselves back in state court. But because federal removal under the Westfall Act is permanent, they were stuck.
In the meantime, Trump continued to spew bile about Carroll, even after he left office.
And in 2022, New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, a one-year window for adult victims of sexual abuse whose civil suits would otherwise be barred by statutes of limitation to sue. On Thanksgiving 2022, the very day the law went into effect, Carroll filed her second suit, alleging defamation and sexual abuse under the ASA.
That case, Carroll II, went to trial in the spring of 2023. After weighing testimony from two other women who’d separately accused Trump of sexual assault, the Access Hollywood tape, and Trump’s own videotaped depositions, the jurors found that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her when he denied it. They awarded her $5 million in damages.