On Tuesday, a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump liable on almost all of the counts against him, including sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages. (The jury didn’t find Trump liable of rape.) This counts as a big win for the former advice columnist and media personality. But make no mistake, her case was originally a long shot. That is, until Trump testified at his deposition.
Carroll first sued Trump alleging defamation in 2019. At that time, the statute of limitations for civil cases alleging sexual assault had long since expired. So Carroll employed a creative workaround: She sued him for defamation after he said Carroll lied about having sexually abused her. Then, in 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which gave adult sexual assault survivors a one-time, one-year window to file lawsuits, regardless of how old the allegations were. Some 30 minutes after the act took effect, Carroll’s attorneys filed their lawsuit against Trump alleging civil rape.
Some 30 minutes after the act took effect, Carroll’s attorneys filed their lawsuit against Trump alleging civil rape.
The central issue in both cases was always “exactly the same — whether Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,” according to Judge Lewis Kaplan. Although the jury ultimately stopped short of saying Trump committed rape, it concluded he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her when she spoke out about it.
But again, Carroll was the underdog up until the trial actually began. The Adult Survivors Act does empower victims to file complaints against their assailants decades after the statute of limitations expires. Yet it’s one thing to file a complaint in court. It’s another thing to have to prove your sexual abuse case, after evidence has decayed and witnesses’ memories have faded. The Carroll v. Trump case highlighted how difficult it is to track down some of these important details decades later. Both sides were at…
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