Former President Donald Trump was ordered to pay $5 million in damages to plaintiff E. Jean Carroll, after a civil trial found him liable for battery and defamation stemming from an incident at a department store in the 1990s.
Following a two-week trial, jury members agreed that Trump didn’t rape Carroll, but did sexually abuse her in the dressing room of luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. The trial also concluded that the former president defamed Carroll when he repeatedly denied the allegations when they surfaced in 2019.
Trump is currently facing a series of separate criminal charges in New York over allegedly making a hush-money deal with a porn star leading up to the 2016 presidential election. The former president, who is also seeking the Republican bid for the upcoming 2024 presidential election, insists he didn’t do anything wrong in any of the cases, and even refrained from testifying during the Carroll trial aside from a pre-recorded deposition whereby he insisted she fabricated the entire story to gain publicity.
Carroll, who brought the allegations to light in 2019 via an article in the New York Magazine, claimed Trump raped her in the dressing room, leaving her “unable to ever have a romantic life again.” Trump’s lawyer, meanwhile, insisted that Carroll’s allegations share the same storyline as a 2012 episode from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” where a character recounts a rape daydream they had in the lingerie section of Bergdorf Goodman. Carroll said she knew about the episode, but had never seen it.
Still, even despite Carroll’s lawsuit, the Republican nominee hopeful is still popular among right-wing voters, who have been flooding his campaign with donations after he was indicted over the hush-money donation in April.
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