What to know if Trump faces another defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll

A jury in Manhattan is expected to begin considering Tuesday how much money former President Donald J. Trump will have to pay writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of raping her nearly three decades ago.

Trump plans to attend the first day of the trial before heading to New Hampshire to campaign ahead of the presidential primaries there next week. He was expected to fly from Iowa late Monday night to New York, where the nation's first caucuses were being held that evening.

Ms. Carroll, 80, has said she encountered Mr. Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, where he pushed her against a dressing room wall and forced himself on her. Trump, 77, has vociferously denied the allegations since Ms. Carroll first made them more than four years ago.

The civil lawsuit focuses on statements made by Mr. Trump in June 2019 after Ms. Carroll revealed her accusation in New York magazine. Mr. Trump called her claim “completely untrue” and said he had never met Ms. Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, and that she had made up a story to sell a book.

The trial is the second in eight months that will pit Ms. Carroll against the former president. Last May, a jury awarded her just over $2 million after finding Mr. Trump liable for sexually assaulting her in the locker room and nearly $3 million for defamation when he wrote on his Truth Social website in October 2022 that her claim was a “complete scam”. job” and “a hoax and a lie.”

Mr. Trump, who is eyeing the Republican presidential nominee, has said for weeks that he wanted to attend Ms. Carroll's trial and testify. His comments sparked a bitter dispute between lawyers for Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump over what the former president might say if he took the stand, and whether he would stray outside the strict boundaries the judge set.

Here's what you need to know about the case:

Curtain call in court

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of the Federal District Court, has ruled that, given the jury's findings in the first trial, Mr. Trump cannot now dispute Ms. Carroll's version of events in the locker room — as he often does does in the locker room. public statements.

“Mr. Trump is prohibited from offering any testimony, evidence or argument showing or implying that he did not sexually assault Ms. Carroll, that she fabricated her account of the assault, or that she had any motive to do so” , Judge Kaplan wrote in an opinion dated January 9.

The judge previously ruled that Ms. Carroll did not have to prove again that Mr. Trump's comments in 2019 were defamatory, ruling that they were substantially the same as the statements that prompted last year's award.

“This trial will not be a 'takeover' of the previous trial,” Judge Kaplan said on January 9.

Double punishment

Despite the jury awarding Mr Trump $5 million last May, his attacks on Ms Carroll did not stop.

The former president continues to lash out at her relentlessly — on Truth Social, on the campaign trail and Thursday at a news conference after attending the final day of a civil fraud lawsuit filed against him by New York's attorney general in state court. Mr. Trump told reporters that he would attend Ms. Carroll's trial, “and I'm going to explain that I don't know who she is.”

In the trial, which begins on Tuesday, Ms. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages for damage to her reputation, plus an unspecified amount of punitive damages intended to punish and deter misconduct. Legal experts have said that substantial damages for Ms. Carroll may be the most effective way to try to silence Mr. Trump.

Ms. Carroll's lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, and Mr. Trump's lawyer, Alina Habba, have both declined to comment on the case in recent days.

What happened at Bergdorf Goodman

Ms. Carroll testified last spring that the attack at Bergdorf occurred after she encountered Mr. Trump one evening and he asked her to help buy a gift for a friend.

They ended up in the lingerie department, where he waved her into a dressing room, closed the door and began assaulting her. He used his weight to hold her down, pulled down her panties and pushed his fingers and then, she said, his penis into her vagina. However, the jury did not find that he had raped her.

Judge Kaplan ruled that because the jury found that Mr. Trump had used his fingers to assault her, her rape claim was “substantially true in modern language.”