NEW YORK (AP): After a big victory in the Iowa caucus, former President Donald Trump is expected in court Tuesday to face another legal challenge: a trial to determine how much more he owes the writer E. Jean Carroll for denying that he assaulted her in the 1990s and accusing her of lying about her claims.
Jury selection begins Tuesday morning at a federal court in Manhattan. Opening arguments could take place by afternoon in what is essentially a second penalty phase of a legal fight Carroll has already won.
In May, a different jury awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding that Trump abused her in a department store dressing room in spring 1996, then defamed her in 2022 by claiming she made it up after she revealed it publicly in a 2019 memoir. The jury said Carroll hadn’t proven that Trump raped her.
Determining that dollar amount will be the new jury’s only job.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled last year that the new jury didn’t need to decide anew whether Carroll was abused or whether Trump’s remarks about her were defamatory since those subjects were covered in the first trial.
Trump is expected at the trial Tuesday, though his plans for the rest of the week have become unclear since his mother-in-law’s funeral was scheduled for Thursday. The trial is expected to last several days.
Advertisement
He has said he wants to testify, but if he does there will be strict limits on what he can talk about. He did not attend last year’s trial, saying recently that his lawyer advised against it.
Because the trial is supposed to be focused only on how much Trump owes Carroll, the judge has warned Trump and his lawyers that they cannot say things to jurors that he has said on the campaign trail or elsewhere, like claiming she lied about him to promote her memoir.
Kaplan also banned them from saying anything about Carroll’s “past romantic relationships, sexual disposition, and prior sexual experiences,” from suggesting Trump didn’t sexually abuse Carroll or from implying she was motivated by “a political agenda, financial interests, mental illness, or otherwise.”
They are also banned, the judge said, from advancing any argument inconsistent with the court’s ruling that “Mr. Trump, with actual malice, lied about sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll.”
