NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday denied Donald Trump’s bid for a new trial two months after a jury found that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.
In a 59-page decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that “the proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”
He said that the former president’s argument “therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and mistakenly focuses on the New York Penal Law definition of ‘rape’ to the exclusion of the meaning of that word as it often is used in everyday life and of the evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump.”
In seeking a reduction in damages, Trump called the $2 million award for sexual abuse “grossly excessive” because such abuse could have included groping Carroll’s breasts through clothing, “which is a far cry from rape.”
But Judge Kaplan said New York’s penal law defines rape much more narrowly than ordinary people think of the term, and that Trump was wrong to insist it excused him.
“The proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” the judge wrote. “Mr. Trump’s argument therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and (ignored) evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump,” he added.
