A federal judge in New York dismissed, Monday, August 7, a legal action by Donald Trump, who considers himself defamed by E. Jean Carroll, a former journalist for the magazine Shewho for years has accused the former US president of raping her in 1996.
Mr Trump, 77, who hopes to win back the White House in 2024, was found responsible by a New York civil court jury on May 9 for the sexual assault – not the rape – of the former columnist , to whom he must pay 5 million dollars (the equivalent of 4.5 million euros) in damages.
This 79-year-old woman had filed a new defamation complaint two weeks after the trial for comments Mr. Trump had made on CNN the day after the verdict: “She is crazy”, he had launched. As part of this new approach by Mme Carroll, Mr. Trump brought counter-arguments to a story, he says, “invented from scratch”demanding a new civil trial.
First prosecutions from November 2019
Also on CNN in May, Mme Carroll said: “Oh yes, he did, he did”, after the jury found that she had been the victim of a sexual assault but not a rape. However, according to an order, Monday, of the judge of the federal civil court of Manhattan, Lewis Kaplan, the accusations of Mme Carroll that Mr. Trump raped her in a dressing room in the lingerie department of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in the spring of 1996, are “true on the bottom”.
The jury on May 9 had agreed that Mr. Trump had penetrated her with a finger but not his penis, a crime that would have constituted rape under the law in New York. But for Judge Kaplan, “both of these acts do constitute rape in common parlance, as defined by some dictionaries, in federal and other state criminal law” Americans.
The new complaint at the end of May from Mme Carroll had been paid in the first civil lawsuits brought in November 2019, again for defamation, against the former president. That 2019 action had been delayed by procedural battles, including over whether Mr. Trump enjoyed presidential immunity in 2019, while he was still in the White House (2017-2021).