The jury of a civil court in New York considered, Tuesday, May 9, that Donald Trump was responsible for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, as well as defamation of the magazine’s former journalist She. Mme Carroll also accused the former US president of rape, for facts dating back to 1996, an accusation that the court did not accept, which also condemned Mr. Trump to pay him $ 5 million in damages for the physical and psychological consequences endured.
After two weeks of trial, where Donald Trump did not come to testify in Manhattan federal court, the jurors had to decide whether the plaintiff, now 79, had demonstrated that Donald Trump had raped her, sexually assaulted her , or had imposed touching him without his consent, in a fitting room of a New York department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in the spring of 1996. These accusations were disputed by Donald Trump, who plans to regain the White House in 2024 .
The trial, which lasted two weeks, differs from a criminal procedure: Donald Trump was not charged with rape. The president of the civil court asked the jurors to define whether, in their view, the former American president was legally responsible for a sexual assault and defamation of the plaintiff, as defined by the laws of the State of New York.
Immediately after the jury retired to deliberate on Tuesday, the plaintiff’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, lamented that Donald Trump made a new post on his social network, Truth Social, when the judge asked that he s refrain from disrupting the debates through the media.
The former president affirms, wrongly, that he is not authorized to speak at this trial, while the judge has invited him to testify on numerous occasions. He accuses the civil party of “accusing him falsely in a book of rape and working with the press”. “I will not speak until after the trial but will appeal, as a candidate and whatever the result, the fact that I am being silenced unconstitutionally”Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.
E. Jean Carroll had made her first revelations in 2019, in a book, where she accused Donald Trump, then President of the United States, for the first time. She had filed a complaint for defamation, because he had accused her of lying so that her work would sell well. Then, last November, she filed a lawsuit for rape, thanks to a new law in the State of New York allowing alleged victims to sue in civil justice even for potentially prescribed facts.