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MANHATTAN (CN) — On a snowy Tuesday after winning the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald Trump arrived in Manhattan federal court for the first day of his second defamation trial over denials that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in a fitting room in New York City’s famed Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996.
Wearing a suit with his signature large red tie, Trump arrived at the courthouse out of the public eye, through a back entrance, and entered the 26th-floor courtroom through a side door.
Trump’s return to the Big Apple was designed to be only a brief visit, with a campaign event scheduled in Atkinson, New Hampshire — 239 miles away — later in the day.
He sat at the defense table behind his accuser on Tuesday morning during jury selection, but did not return to the courtroom after the lunch break for the trial’s opening arguments in the afternoon.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has already found Trump liable on Carroll’s defamation claims in pretrial summary judgment, so the jury trial in the Southern District of New York will be to determine how much he owes her in damages.
The nine-person jury will hear evidence pertaining to $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages requested by Carroll.
The former Elle magazine advice columnist seeks civil damages for defamation in her 2019 lawsuit, saying Trump stained her reputation by denying that he sexually assaulted her some 25 years earlier inside a dressing room in the lingerie section of Bergdorf Goodman.
“Trump was president when he made those statements, and he used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll, to humiliate her, and to destroy her reputation,” Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley said during opening arguments Tuesday afternoon.
“We’re here because when she did that, Donald Trump didn’t just deny the assault. He went much, much further. He denied ever meeting Ms. Carroll,” Crowley, a former federal prosecutor, told jurors. “He accused her of lying and making up a story to make money and to advance some political conspiracy against him, and he threatened her. He said she should pay dearly for speaking out against him.”
“He said these things from the White House,” she said, contextualizing the scale of Trump’s bully pulpit in 2019, inspiring “vicious, brutal, demeaning attacks” from Trump’s followers who “echoed and expanded” his lies about Carroll.
Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, previously denied Trump’s motion for summary judgment and rejected his request to add presidential immunity as a defense, which was also denied last month by the Second Circuit court of appeals.
Represented in the civil trial by Bedminster, New Jersey-based attorneys Alina Habba and Michael Madaio, Trump made public statements declaring his intention to testify at Carroll’s trial, having not attended a single day of her previous trial.
During the defense’s opening argument on Tuesday afternoon, Habba told jurors that Trump did not harm Carroll’s reputation because she was “fully enjoying the attention she was receiving” in the wake of Trump’s denials.
“She has been thrust back into the limelight as she had always wanted,” she said. “She was loving the adulation.”
Habba told jurors that this defamation trial does not hinge “on the truth of plaintiff’s original assault allegations,” and asserts that many social media posts that Carroll say harmed her “have absolutely no connection” to Trump’s inflammatory comments about her.
“Here she is looking for you to give her a windfall because some people on social media said mean things about her. But in today’s day and age, the internet always has something to say, and it’s not always going to be nice. Imagine if every time a public person got a mean tweet, they could get money. They could sue someone and get money for the backlash from that because people didn’t agree.”
“She doesn’t want to fix her reputation, ladies and gentleman," Habba told jurors. “She likes her new brand.”
Kaplan issued a one-page order over the weekend ahead of the trial saying Trump would be allowed testify Monday, Jan. 22, even if the trial is scheduled to last from Tuesday to Thursday. The delay gives the former president leeway to attend the funeral of Amalija Knavs, the mother of former first lady Melania Trump.
“That is the allowance I made and it will be the only allowance I make,” the judge said Tuesday, before jury selection began.
In ruling against Trump on summary judgment, Kaplan found the then-president acted with actual malice in making a series of false statements about Carroll in June 2019 when she came forward with accusations that Trump raped her decades earlier.
On Tuesday morning, Trump shook his head side to side in the “no” gesture while Judge Kaplan explained during jury selection: “It has been determined already that Mr. Trump did sexually assault Ms. Carroll, that he knew when he made the statements about Ms. Carroll that the statements were false, that he made them with reckless disregard to whether they were true or false.”
Later, Trump slouched forward at desk when the judge asks prospective jurors: “Have you read or heard through the media otherwise any allegations of sexual conduct against Donald Trump or any comments he made or may have reportedly made about such allegations?”
Three prospective jurors answered yes when the judge inquired if anyone in the jury pool feels that “Trump is being treated unfairly by the court system in the United States.” Two people in the jury pool said they believed that the 2020 election had been stolen; neither of them were picked for the nine-person jury.
Kaplan previously ruled that a jury’s verdict in May 2023 in Carroll’s other lawsuit against Trump, finding him liable for the assault itself and defaming Carroll, controls in the defamation case at issue.
“[T]he jury found that Mr. Trump knew that his statement that Ms. Carroll lied about him sexually assaulting her for improper and ulterior purposes was false or that he acted with reckless disregard to whether it was false,” Kaplan wrote in his 25-page opinion. “Whether Mr. Trump made the 2019 statements with actual malice raises the same issue.”
Trump’s lawyers have appealed the verdict of the first trial, and his attorneys have argued that if the verdict of the first Carroll trial is overturned, then the summary judgment in the second trial should also be thrown out.
Trump, the first former U.S. president to be indicted, faces 91 criminal counts across four states and federal jurisdictions — in Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia — even as he enjoys front-runner standing in 2024 Republican presidential primary polling.
The race for the Republican presidential nomination continues with the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23, followed by South Carolina on Feb. 3 and Super Tuesday on March 5.
If Trump takes back the presidency, he could order his newly appointed attorney general to throw out any federal charges or pardon himself of any federal convictions.
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