MANHATTAN (CN) — Former President Donald Trump silently walked out of E. Jean Carroll’s civil defamation trial just eight minutes into the Elle magazine columnist’s closing argument, right after her lawyer told jurors “Donald J. Trump thinks the rules don’t apply to him."
Just after Carroll’s attorney told jurors that Trump “continued to repeat his defamatory attacks over and over and over” — despite having lost a trial last spring that found him liable for sexual assault and defamation — Trump rose from his defense table and left the 26th-floor courtroom in Manhattan federal court.
Carroll’s lawyer had been telling jurors that Trump’s ceaseless denials and humiliating attacks on his accuser were an attempt to “normalize conduct that couldn’t be more abnormal.”
"Did he respect the jury verdict? No. Not at all,” Robbie Kaplan told jurors. “Not even for 24 hours."
Kaplan repeatedly mentioned that Trump used the office of the White House, “the world’s biggest megaphone,” to destroy Carroll’s reputation for coming forward about being sexually assaulted by Trump.
For those first eight minutes of Carroll's closing argument, Trump sat at the defense table, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk.
The former president’s sudden exit from the trial caused U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan interrupted Robbie Kaplan's closing argument to note: "Excuse me. The record will reflect that Donald Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom."
The judge and Carroll's lawyer are not related.
Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s adviser, scrambled from a seat behind the defense table to try to follow him out, but Judge Kaplan ordered all of Trump's defense team "to remain seated.”
“And that includes you, Mr. Epshteyn, even though you aren't part of the defense counsel,” the judge said, singling out the strategist and lawyer, who was in close communication with Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.
Anticipating a possible courtroom outburst at the start of the day, Judge Kaplan told the parties: "No one in the courtroom is to say anything except for opposing counsel. … There are to be no interruptions by anybody else. No audible comments by anybody else."
Trump did not leave the courthouse entirely on Friday morning. He returned from a nearby conference room to Judge Kaplan's courtroom for his defense's closing argument.
“That was some rendition of the facts,” Trump's attorney Alina Habba said at the beginning of her closing argument.
Trump's lawyers argued that Carroll's case did not sufficiently prove causation between Trump's denial statements in June 2019 and the online harassment of Carroll by people who Habba said were "standing up for a man they admired" and had "independently" determined that Carroll was a liar.
"We watched six days of a plaintiff trying to pin Twitter trolls' comments on a former president of the United States without accepting any responsibility for the media and the press frenzy and the public profile that she wanted and still enjoys," she said.
"You are not here to pay Carroll for people who wrote mean Tweets to her and they have to make a connection to the harm she says she suffered and Trump's two statements," Habba told jurors. "It's her burden and she has failed to meet that burden."
Habba said Trump does not condone the online harassment of E. Jean Carroll and insisted he did not direct his followers to carry out any attacks against her.
"All he did was tell his truth," she said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't about President Trump and E. Jean Carroll. This is about some people in their mother’s basements who will always be mean on social media," Habba concluded. "You can’t stop that."
During Carroll's rebuttal argument, her attorney Shawn Crowley told jurors what Habba had referred to as "mean Tweets" from "Twitter trolls" were really death threats sent to Carroll, "dripping with hate, with malice."
The online posts and messages were "death threats from people who believed his lies and expanded on his threats," she said.
"One of the questions you have to decide is whether he acted with malice. What could be more on-brand for Donald Trump than malice," Crowley, a former federal prosecutor, posited.
“You saw how he has behaved through this trial - you heard him," she continued. "You saw him stand up and walk out of the courtroom while Ms. Kaplan was speaking. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump... He gets to do whatever he wants and use his massive powerful platform to keep ruining her life.”
Crowley urged the jury to award an amount of damages great enough to "make him stop, make him pay enough so that he will stop."
Trump continued to reprise his denials and smears late Thursday night on his TruthSocial social media platform, writing nearly verbatim what he had previously muttered in court: “I don’t even know who this woman is — I have no idea who she is, or where she came from. This is ANOTHER SCAM … it’s a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT.”
Before jurors had entered the courtroom on Friday morning, Trump’s attorneys got into a bitter spat with the judge about slides they intended to show jurors in the defense’s closing summation, which included dozens of Carroll’s old tweets including salacious sexual and dating content in tune with her “Ask E. Jean” advice column.
Kaplan instructed Trump's attorneys that they were not to include evidence in their closing argument that had not been introduced during the trial.
When Habba interrupted him to continue arguing, the judge sternly admonished her: "You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockout. Now, sit down."
Since the judge has already found Trump liable on Carroll’s defamation claims in pretrial summary judgment, the jury will only determine much he owes her in damages.
Because Trump chose not to attend Carroll’s first rape and defamation trial, Judge Kaplan instructed Trump’s lawyers that he cannot offer any evidence “disputing or tending to undermine” determinations of fact from the first trial, where a jury concluded Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and later defamed her with his denial statements.
Carroll's attorneys want jurors to order punitive damages "to stop him and others like him from acting in a similar manner in the future."
"Donald Trump is spreading proven lies about a sexual assault victim for his own benefit," Robert Kaplan told jurors, showing them recent clips of Trump repeating his claims that Carroll is a "whackjob" and that her account of the sexual assault was "fake and made up."
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