The accusations by the writer E. Jean Carroll that former President Donald J. Trump raped her and defamed her have been the subject of two separate trials in U.S. District Court in Lower Manhattan and have reverberated in Mr. Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Last May, a jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine who said he assaulted her nearly three decades ago in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
That same jury found he had also defamed her after he repeatedly denied the accusations and accused her of lying. Now, Mr. Trump, 77, is back in the same federal courthouse, defending himself again against accusations of defamation.
On Thursday, Ms. Carroll, the first witness in the case, ended her testimony in a trial that is expected to wrap up next week. It is still unknown whether Mr. Trump will take the stand.
Here’s a closer look at the two cases and what’s at stake.
Why were there two trials?
Ms. Carroll, 80, filed two lawsuits against Mr. Trump. The first, in 2019, accused the former president of making disparaging comments and branding her a liar in response to the publication of her book “Why Do We Need Men? A Modest Proposal.”
On June 21 of that year, Ms. Carroll published an excerpt from the book in New York magazine describing the assault.
Mr. Trump immediately denounced her, first in a statement issued from the White House that day that accused her of being motivated by trying to sell her book, and again the following day when reporters crowded around him at the White House to ask about the accusations.
He denied knowing Ms. Carroll and said people who make such charges “have to be careful, because they are playing with very dangerous territory.”
In 2022, Ms. Carroll filed a second lawsuit, accusing Trump of rape, and a new defamation claim based on social media statements in October of that year in which Mr. Trump accused her of perpetrating a hoax. She was able to sue over the rape accusation after New York passed a law giving adult sexual assault victims a one-time opportunity to file civil cases even if the statute of limitations had long expired.
Mr. Trump was never charged criminally with sexual assault and cannot be, because the assault on Ms. Carroll is beyond the statute of limitations. In criminal court, the standard of proof is high: A jury must find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, it is lower: A jury can decide liability if it decides there is a more than 50 percent chance that the claim was true.
Because the two civil lawsuits can be hard to distinguish, they are sometimes referred to in court papers as Carroll I (the 2019 lawsuit) and Carroll II (the 2022 suit).
Carroll I became mired in appeals after Mr. Trump argued he could not be sued as a sitting president. Carroll II, which was able to move forward because it centered on statements Mr. Trump had made when he was no longer in office, went to trial last spring.
In May, jurors awarded Ms. Carroll a little more than $2 million for sexual abuse. They also awarded her $3 million in damages for defamation.
This week, after the appeals of Carroll I ended, the trial finally began. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has presided over both cases, ruled that the defamation finding in May would carry over to the new trial.
“This trial will not be a ‘do over’ of the previous trial,” Judge Kaplan wrote on Jan. 9.
In September, he ruled that even though the jury found that Mr. Trump had assaulted Ms. Carroll only with his fingers, her rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”
He thus limited the trial that began Tuesday to one issue — what damages, if any, Mr. Trump must pay Ms. Carroll for defaming her in 2019.
Why were Mr. Trump’s comments defamatory?
Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Shawn G. Crowley, said in her opening statement on Tuesday that the former president used his position in the White House, “the most famous platform on Earth, to lie about what he had done, to attack Ms. Carroll’s hard-earned integrity and to falsely accuse her.”
But Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, responded that when Mr. Trump denounced Ms. Carroll in 2019, he was defending himself against a serious accusation.
Anger from his supporters was predictable, Ms. Habba told the jury. And Ms. Carroll brought on more with appearances promoting her book, Ms. Habba said.
“The harm she suffered in this case, the harm you have to decide, consists of mean tweets from Twitter trolls,” Ms. Habba told the jury. “And she wants my client to pay for their actions.”
But defending yourself against an accusation is not the same as debasing the person who is making it, according to legal observers.
Anne S. Douds, chairwoman of the public policy department at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and a lawyer who represented both defendants and plaintiffs in defamation cases, said Mr. Trump can deny Ms. Carroll’s accusations, but he can’t say she lied for monetary gain or other motives. “You can say that you didn’t do something, but you can’t say that the other person did something that they didn’t do,” she said.
People bringing defamation cases have a high hurdle to clear in court, said Meryl Conant Governski, a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Manhattan who has also represented both sides in defamation cases.
They must prove not only that a statement was false, but also that it was published to at least one other person, caused harm and was made by someone who knew or should have known that it was untrue, she said.
“Ultimately if defending yourself to the public means saying something untrue about someone else, that is actionable,” Ms. Governski said.
What case is Trump making now?
Mr. Trump, who has said he wants to take the stand, has argued through his lawyers that Ms. Carroll’s reputation was not hurt by his denunciations.
Her status rose, and she reveled in the new attention that came with making such a serious accusation against a sitting president, Ms. Habba said.
Ms. Habba has brought up Ms. Carroll’s friendship with Mary Trump, Mr. Trump’s niece who has written critically about him, the many celebrities who praised her and social media posts and messages that supported her.
During her opening statement, Ms. Habba said the defense would show that even friends of Ms. Carroll’s thought “her head was getting too big and that she was loving the adulation.”
During cross-examination, Ms. Habba asked Ms. Carroll about her income. Ms. Carroll said that in the 1990s, she was earning $400,000 a year writing for magazines. By 2018, she said, as falling ad revenue forced magazines to shrink their budgets, she was making only $60,000.
On Thursday, Ms. Carroll said that she is making $100,000 a year for an online column.
“So your reputation in many ways is better today, isn’t it?” Ms. Habba asked.
“My status was lowered,” Ms. Carroll said. “I’m partaking in this trial to bring my old reputation and status back.”
What comes next?
Mr. Trump, who came to court for the first two days of trial, was not present Thursday because he was at the funeral of his mother-in-law in Florida. The trial is expected to last at least through Monday.
Ms. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in compensatory damages from Mr. Trump, the amount her lawyers said would make up for the damage to her reputation. She is also seeking an unspecified amount of punitive damages, which are meant to punish Mr. Trump and deter him from making comments about her in the future.
On Thursday, Ms. Carroll’s lawyers called Ashlee Humphreys, a professor of integrated marketing at Northwestern University, who said Mr. Trump’s statements reached at least 85 million people. At least 21 million would have found those statements credible, Ms. Humphreys said.
Repairing Ms. Carroll’s reputation, Ms. Humphreys said, could require a $12 million publicity campaign — such as pitching stories about her to traditional media, getting her on podcasts and reaching out to public figures like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens, whose audiences include Trump supporters that would otherwise believe him.
Benjamin Weisercontributed reporting.
