Latest news with #EJeanCarroll
Forbes
2 days ago
- Politics
- Forbes
Trump E. Jean Carroll Case: Appeals Court Shuts Down Trump Effort To Kill Case
A federal appeals court Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump's latest effort to throw out writer E. Jean Carroll's defamation case against him, ruling against the president's request to have the government step in for him as a party in the case—and putting Trump one step closer to having to pay out $83 million in damages. Trump is appealing the jury verdict ordering him to pay $83 million for defaming Carroll, based on his attacks against her after she publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Trump asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to allow the government to swap in for him as a party in the case, alleging that since his defamatory statements were made while he was president, Carroll should be suing the government and not Trump as a private citizen. A ruling in Trump's favor would have made it much more likely the appeals court would kill the case under the Westfall Act, which gives federal officials some immunity from legal claims brought over their acts in office. Carroll's attorneys opposed Trump's effort to have the government sub in for him, arguing he can't make such a request after the case has already gone to trial and writing, 'The record, the jury's verdict, and common sense all lead here to only one conclusion – that Trump was serving himself, not the people of the United States, when he viciously defamed Carroll in 2019.' A three-judge panel at the Second Circuit denied Trump's request, only noting the motion to substitute the U.S. government for Trump as a party in the case was denied and an opinion with the court's full reasoning will follow. The ruling comes ahead of the appeals court holding oral arguments on the Carroll case on June 24. The court will then decide whether to uphold the jury's verdict, and the $83 million Trump was ordered to pay, or whether to either kill the case entirely or lower the amount Trump needs to pay. Trump or Carroll could then appeal the case to the Supreme Court, though it's unclear whether justices would take up the dispute. Trump will only have to pay Carroll once the appeals process is fully complete. An appeals court has already separately rejected Trump's appeal of Carroll's other lawsuit against him, which resulted in him being found liable for sexual assault and defamation, with a three-judge panel upholding the jury's verdict. The appeals court then denied Trump's request for the full panel of judges to re-hear the case. The case at the heart of Wednesday's ruling is one of two major verdicts against Trump regarding Carroll. The writer first sued Trump in 2019 for defamation after he attacked her for going public with her allegations against him, claiming Carroll is not 'my type' and forcefully denying her allegations of assault. Carroll then brought a second lawsuit alleging both defamation and sexual assault under New York's Adult Survivors Act. That case ended up going to trial first, resulting in a jury finding Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation—but not rape—and ordering him to pay $5 million in damages. The first defamation case then went to trial in January 2024, resulting in the jury ordering Trump to pay $83 million. The case took so long to go to trial because of the longrunning dispute over whether Trump's defamatory comments were an official act as president, with the case bouncing around through different courts as judges kept punting on the issue of whether the case fell into the government's scope. The Biden administration's Department of Justice in 2023 ultimately stopped arguing that Trump's comments were official acts, based on the ruling against him in the other Carroll case, paving the way for the lawsuit to go to trial.
The Independent
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
‘My mission is to make him so angry:' E Jean Carroll reveals plans for her $83m judgement against the president
E Jean Carroll, the woman who beat President Donald Trump in two separate court cases, has vowed to make him 'so mad' by spending her multimillion-dollar windfall on 'things that Trump hates.' In 2019, Carroll accused the commander-in-chief of raping her in the changing rooms of New York's Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996, resulting in a civil case in 2023 in which he was found liable for sexual abuse and ordered to pay her $5m in compensation. She then sued him again for defamation after he repeatedly protested his innocence and denied knowing her, which resulted in a jury awarding her an astonishing $83.3 million payout in early 2024. A U.S. appeals court last week rejected Trump's attempt to overturn the first verdict. He is still appealing the second, claiming presidential immunity. Carroll, 81, is currently promoting a new book, "Not My Type," a title taken from the president's notorious slur against her. She told Newsweek that she's setting up a charitable foundation in her own name to manage the money and distribute donations to anti-Trump causes. 'My mission is to make him so angry and so mad by taking this $83.3 million and giving it to things that Trump hates. That's what I'm doing,' she explained. Carroll specifically said she would direct her capital to areas like 'women's reproductive rights, binding up the wounds that he's inflicting on democracy and shoring up voting rights.' The former columnist told Newsweek that she found it 'stunning' that Trump had won last November's presidential election after a year of blockbuster indictments and court hearings outlining his long track record of troubling behavior. She said the outcome left her with little choice but to conclude: 'People don't believe women when they're saying one thing and a very, very powerful man is saying something else.' Carroll said she retains 'complete, 100 percent faith' in the legal system as a corrective to executive overreach and corruption, but urged people, particularly women, to continue protesting against the administration in the streets. ' Women have the power. We just have to realize it. We hold, as they say, the purse strings,' she said. Shockingly, the writer also revealed that she is not taking any chances when it comes to her own safety, given the recent wave of political violence in America, and sleeps at night alongside a Mossberg shotgun she has nicknamed 'Aphrodite,' after the Greek goddess of love, and two guard dogs. Not My Type is about her experiences taking on Trump in Manhattan federal courtrooms, an experience she described as 'comedy gold' and which she said she was able to recollect thanks to the voice-accurate notes she recorded after each day's session as reminders, as well as the official court transcripts. Carroll described the transcripts as 'probably the most comedic script ever written since Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels ' and said she relished observing and describing Trump's defense lawyers, particularly the fashion-conscious Alina Habba and the hulking Joe Tacopina, noting the latter was 'built like Popeye' with 'glittering eyes.' 'The whole thing to me was like a high comedy,' she said.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Not My Type,' E. Jean Carroll Gets the Last Gab About the Trump Trials
NOT MY TYPE: One Woman vs. a President, by E. Jean Carroll We already know that E. Jean Carroll looked smashing when she went to court versus Donald J. Trump. But her irrepressible voice was, necessarily, repressed. For 27 years, with countless exclamation points and emphatic italics, Carroll wrote the 'Ask E. Jean' column for Elle magazine, focusing on the perils of modern dating. Advice columns, a quaint holdover from the heyday of print you'd think ChatGPT would make redundant, remain curiously ubiquitous. Yet even in a crowded field, this adrenalized agony aunt, currently on Substack, stands out, with her giddy feminism (her tuxedo cat is named Vagina T. Fireball); literary references (the Great Pyrenees dog: Miss Havisham); and runaway retro expressions like 'egads!' and 'twitpiffle.' Testifying in depositions and two trials, however, Carroll was instructed by her lawyers to keep her answers short. 'Very, very short,' she writes in 'Not My Type,' a delightful full-gallop account of the experience, and sequel of sorts to 'What Do We Need Men For?' (2019), in which she first accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. 'I receive the impression that saying nothing at all would be best,' she adds. Now she is saying pretty much everything, including a few evidentiary morsels not introduced at trial. Like that Jeffrey Epstein, Trump's friend, had heard and gossiped about what had happened. And a 1987 'Spy 100' issue listed Bergdorf dressing rooms in an article about places for 'lunchtime adultery.' The man the magazine called a 'short-fingered vulgarian' was among those on the cover. Trump has plenty of his own insults at hand, of course. Indeed the title 'Not My Type' is taken from one about why he never would have advanced on the unconsenting Carroll: 'No. 1, she's not my type.' (He did, however, mistake her in an old photo for one of his exes, Marla Maples.) 'No. 2, it never happened,' he added. 'It never happened, OK?' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump fails to overturn $5m damages award to E Jean Carroll for defamation
Donald Trump has lost his latest legal attempt to challenge the $5m in damages awarded against him for defaming E Jean Carroll, the New York writer who a jury found was sexually abused by the president in the 1990s, before he embarked on his political career. A US appeals court in New York City on Friday denied Trump's request to reconsider its decision in December to uphold the jury's award of $5m to Carroll. The court was divided in its opinion, with two Trump-appointed judges, Steven Menashi and Michael Park, dissenting. Carroll, a former magazine columnist, accused Trump of attacking her around 1996 in a department store dressing room in Manhattan. In 2023, a civil jury trial concluded that Trump did sexually abuse her and then defamed her in 2022 when he denied the allegations as a hoax and said that Carroll was 'not my type'. The jury awarded Carroll, who is now 81, a total of $5m in compensatory and punitive damages. More than two dozen different women have accused Trump over the past decade of sexual assault. Related: Donald Trump loses appeal against E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict Trump, who has denied all allegations against him, argued that the trial judge in the Carroll case should not have let jurors review the notorious 2005 Access Hollywood video of him bragging about groping women and that his alleged mistreatment of two other women also should not have been included. The emergence of the Access Hollywood tape was a bombshell in the closing stages of the 2016 presidential election but did not derail Trump's campaign. He beat Democrat Hillary Clinton to win the White House and, after losing to Joe Biden in 2020, triumphed again in 2024 and began a second term in January. The president, who turns 79 on Saturday, is appealing a separate $83m jury award to Carroll for defaming her and harming her reputation when he denied her claim in 2019. In Trump's appeal against this January 2024 ruling, the president is arguing that the US supreme court's decision to provide sweeping legal immunity to presidents should shield him for liability in this instance, too. Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan issued a statement later on Friday, saying: 'E Jean Carroll is very pleased with today's decision. Although President Trump continues to try every possible maneuver to challenge the findings of two separate juries, those efforts have failed. He remains liable for sexual assault and defamation.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Court Hands Trump Huge Blow in E. Jean Carroll Sex Abuse Case
A federal appeals court has rejected President Donald Trump's request to rehear a jury verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll. The decision solidifies a judge's earlier decision that upheld his liability for sexually abusing and defaming the advice columnist. On Friday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan declined to reconsider its Dec. 30 ruling, which affirmed that Trump was responsible for both the sexual assault and resulting defamation. Biden-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez said after the 8-2 verdict: 'Simply re-litigating a case is not an appropriate use of the en banc procedure. 'In those rare instances in which a case warrants our collective consideration, it is almost always because it involves a question of exceptional importance or a conflict between the panel's opinion and appellate precedent.' The journalist alleged that the then-businessman sexually abused her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-90s. The $5 million award stems from a May 2023 civil verdict in which jurors found Trump had non-consensually touched Carroll and defamed her with his denials. She came forward with her story during Trump's first term as president. Trump's legal team argued the court had wrongly allowed evidence—including the 2005 Access Hollywood tape and testimonies from other women—into the trial. The two dissenting votes were from Trump-appointed 2nd Circuit judges, Steven Menashi and Michael Park. 'The result was a jury verdict based on impermissible character evidence and few reliable facts. No one can have any confidence that the jury would have returned the same verdict if the normal rules of evidence had been applied,' Menashi wrote. Three other available judges recused from voting without explaining their decision. Trump's team has also appealed a separate $83.3 million defamation judgment from Jan. 2024 and continues to argue that his social media denials are protected by presidential immunity. Trump has denied knowing Carroll and labeled her allegations as fabricated. The defamation case goes to a three-judge 2nd Circuit panel later this month. 'E. Jean Carroll is very pleased with today's decision,' Carroll and her attorney said in a joint statement. 'Although President Trump continues to try every possible maneuver to challenge the findings of two separate juries, those efforts have failed. He remains liable for sexual assault and defamation,' they continued.
