What E. Jean Carroll's Legal Victory Means
Donald Trump's decision to fight civil cases rather than settle, and appeal rather than pay up, could be a serious financial miscalculation for his presidential campaign
On Friday, after deliberating for three hours, a nine-person federal jury in Lower Manhattan awarded journalist E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in her defamation case against Donald J. Trump. The jury consisted of seven men and two women: currently they are anonymous, and United States District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan advised them to never disclose their identities. As Brent D. Griffiths and Laura Italiano wrote at Business Insider, this isn’t an unusual instruction from the bench: “many judges advise jurors that while they can speak to the media after high-profile trials it may not be in the best interest to do so.”
Juries don’t always take this advice, but since Trump attacking anyone who crosses him and unleashing breathtakingly terrifying MAGAts on them was what this case was about, my guess is that they will.
As sportscaster Warner Wolf used to say, let’s go to the videotape.
This is how Carroll and Trump ended up in civil court thirty years after he sexually assaulted her. In “Hideous Men,” a New York magazine article excerpted from What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2019), Carroll made “a list of the 21 most revolting scoundrels I have ever met.” One was Donald Trump, and she described an encounter in which he lured her into a dressing room at Bergdorf’s on the pretext that she would help him pick out a negligée for one of his girlfriends by trying it on. “This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself,” Carroll recalled thinking, already turning it into a story in her head; “and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity.”
According to Carroll, this is what happened next:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes.
In response to this revelation, Trump called Carroll a liar, said she was just trying to sell the book, that he had never met her and that she was “not my type.” Carroll engaged attorney Roberta Kaplan to sue Trump for defamation (notably, however, he did not countersue Carroll, New York magazine, or St. Martin’s Griffin for defaming him.) And in order to decide whether Trump had defamed Carroll or not, the jury had to decide whether she was telling the truth about the sexual assault. They decided that she had been sexually assaulted and awarded her $5.5 million on May 9, 2023—not for being raped, but for being lied about.
After the verdict, Trump went onto his Truth Social account and defamed Carroll again. So Carroll sued him for defamation again, and that’s where Friday’s $83.3 million comes from. Why so much more? Because, as Kaplan persuaded the jury, Trump had to be persuaded to stop doing this, and for a massively wealthy man, losing $5 million was clearly not enough to dissuade him from defaming Carroll. It seems the jury agreed.
As Maria Cramer and Kate Christobek of the New York Times pointed out in Saturday’s paper, Roberta Kaplan “is the only lawyer to have secured not one, but two verdicts against Mr. Trump.” But there is another woman hot on her tail: Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State, who will hear in a matter of days what fines and penalties Judge Arthur Engoron will levy against Trump in the civil fraud case that concluded in December 2023.
James has asked for $250 million, but the damage could be far worse. As Bernard Condon of the Associated Press wrote two days ago, “In an order last September that’s currently under appeal, State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron said Trump had indeed committed fraud and should have the state certificates needed to run many of his New York companies revoked. He said Trump should then be stripped of control over those companies, which are the official owners of his Fifth Avenue headquarters and other marquee properties and have them turned over to a receiver who will manage the “dissolution” of them.
In other words, Donald Trump, and his family (remember, it’s a privately held family business) would no longer be able to run a business in New York. But there’s more, because the New York State case and the Carroll case are intertwined. Here are two personal financial scenarios Trump may have to grapple with:
Robbie Kaplan used Trump's deposition in the New York State case, in which he probably vastly overstated his personal worth, to justify her request to the jury that they impose a fine large enough to make him stop defaming her client. If Trump is worth the billions of dollars he says he is, he did not perjure himself, and he can pay the combined $88.3 million + 10% into an escrow account (which he is required to do) pending appeal. If cannot pay that sum, then he may have perjured himself in the James case.
Trump has already put $5.5 million into escrow in the first defamation case, known colloquially as “Carroll I.” If he cannot come up with the close to the $84 million and change that he needs to put into escrow for Carroll II, he will have to make bond for it. This would mean persuading some entity to lend him the money, when he is notorious for stiffing his lenders; paying interest on amount lent, should be find a guarantor; and allowing that guarantor access to assess his personal and corporate finances, as well as the value of his properties.
But none of these sums include Trump’s own legal bills to date for these civil cases; legal bills for any of the three criminal cases pending against him; or—and these can be more expensive than the original case—costs for appealing any of these decisions. And this is where Trump’s errors as a citizen could impact his 2024 campaign for President.
We know that as he prepared for the 2020 election, Donald Trump developed a vast network of political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs. What we also know is that Trump does not pay his own legal bills, or those he has promised to indemnify.
In other words, Trump has become a personal money pit, not just for his own family, but for the Republican Party in general.
For example, in 2021, the national GOP chipped in $1.6 million for Trump’s legal fees in the New York cases. At the end of July, CBS News reported that the Super PAC Save America spent “$21.6 million on Trump-related legal fees in the first half of 2023. That's the lion's share of the approximately $25 million the PAC spent overall in that period.” But Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times reported at almost the same time that Save America had spent another $16 million on legal bills between 2020 and 2022. Save America also requested a $60 million refund it had transferred to another Trump campaign group.
That transfer, according to one analysis, might also expose Trump’s labyrinth of PACs to FEC scrutiny because of the different rules governing different kinds of PACs. Yet, even more hare-brained schemes have surfaced to plug the holes in Trump’s leaky legal finances. Last week, Florida State Senator Ileana Garcia sponsored a bill in the State Legislature to budget $5 million taxpayer dollars to help pay Trump’s legal fees, a scheme that Governor Ron DeSantis (who may be recovering from his own ill-starred presidential primary campaign) promptly said he would veto.
Last week, as Trump posted a commanding win in the New Hampshire primary, GOP and Trump spokespeople insisted that mega-donors would soon coalesce around the presumptive nominee. But here’s the question we have to ask: Will Trump have trouble attracting and keeping high level donors as he bleeds out cash and time on these legal cases? Will there be enough small donors, whose dollars first funded Save America PAC during the heady days after the 2020 elections, to pay for a campaign and Trump’s personal legal liabilities?
And even if the money taps aren’t turned off, here’s what we know: it isn’t how much money a candidate raises that win’s an election. It’s how it’s spent. And every nickel spent on Trump’s legal fees is not going to actual campaigning, nor is it going to key House and Senate races that the GOP would need to enact a MAGA agenda.
Short takes:
Nikki Haley has responded to the judgement against Trump by saying that she “absolutely trusts the jury.” That said, as Inae Oh reports for Mother Jones, “Haley declined to say that the verdict should disqualify Trump from being her party’s presidential nominee, insisting that voters would eventually reject his ambitions to return to the White House.” Say what you want about this woman (and there is plenty to say), she’s patient and she knows how to stick in a shiv. “Tepid though they may be,” Oh points out, “Haley’s comments about the latest Carroll verdict mark a key escalation in her anti-Trump rhetoric.” (January 28, 2024)
Dear readers: never stiff your criminal attorney! Political fear-monger and serial liar Steve Bannon made this error, and is now trying to block his (former) legal team’s firm from auditing his bank accounts. How? He’s pleading the Fifth amendment, a crucial piece of constitutional law that shields us against self-incrimination. According to Daily Beast political reporter José Pagliery, this defense has caused Bannon’s new attorney, Harlan Protass, “to awkwardly concede that [Bannon’s] personal finances likely have evidence that could bolster the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against him.” Which case? We Build the Wall, “a scammy, xenophobic project that raised crowdfunded money to purportedly build a privately sponsored border wall. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York criminally charged Bannon and his business partners over the ordeal in 2020, but the one-time Trump White House chief strategist managed to score a pardon from his former boss.” Except that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg refiled the case, LOL. (January 27, 2024)
Here’s my question: should we have social media at all if tech billionaires refuse to spend their own, and shareholders’, money to ensure that their platforms are not enabling serious crimes? At TechPolicy, historian Lara Putnam highlights multiple Facebook pages posing as fan sites for the Mexican child hip hop group Los Picus that are, in reality, maintained by traffickers. Often posters masquerading as Tony, a member of the group, “There were a wide variety of posts geared towards getting children to send Friend requests to the poster, often while specifying the ages of the children sought.” Those ages were usually below the age of 12. (January 23, 2024)
I cannot grasp the hold this vulgar and violent man has on so many powerful people. Is it possible that he's been filming them in his buildings and hotels for years? Because you're right: He's a huge, financial Charybdis sucking cash into a bottomless hole. Also, I think it was so brave of Carroll to write about her rape as she did: The part about laughing while struggling against an attacker is so genuine and so deep.