Donald Trump left the jury “mesmerized” by his weird behavior and questionable odor during his high-profile legal battle against E. Jean Carroll, the journalist dished on the Daily Beast Podcast.
Carroll, 81, vividly recalled Trump’s courtroom antics during the 2024 defamation trial that ended with the jury handing her a resounding victory—to the tune of $83.3 million—after she accused Trump of defaming her by calling her a liar over the sexual assault allegations she made against him.
“I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat, elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and sits in a courtroom and moans and groans and complains and snorts,” she told host Joanna Coles.
Trump, who was campaigning to become the Republican nominee at the time of the trial, left an unforgettable impression on the jury, Carroll said.
“They were mesmerized. You have never seen anything like it,” she recounted. “He never sat still, and he talked the entire time within earshot of the jury. He belittled Alina Habba, his own attorney. He would spit as he was talking. He didn’t smell so good.”
But the climax, Carroll went on, was when her lawyer and high-powered attorney Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan drove Trump out of the courtroom while delivering the closing argument in the case.
“He stood up with steam coming off his back and hot air blowing out his ears because Robbie Kaplan was giving the final argument, and she was asking the jury how much it would take to make him stop,” she said.
“She drove him so crazy, he stood up in the courtroom and left,” Carroll added. “When a man is innocent, he doesn’t storm out of a courtroom; he stays and fights. He turned tail and stormed out of the courtroom. He lost right at that second. He couldn’t have looked more guilty.”
Carroll, a prominent magazine columnist, first went public with her sexual assault allegations against Trump in 2019. She accused Trump of raping her in the lingerie dressing room of the upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s.
Trump has consistently denied the allegations, branding Carroll a liar while declaring, “She’s not my type.” In 2023, however, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and awarded her $5 million.
But the $83.3 million “big kahuna verdict,” in the words of Kaplan, came in 2024 after the jury reached a decision on Carroll’s defamation suit against Trump.
“When the jury heard the evidence, it wasn’t very hard,” Kaplan told the Daily Beast.
Carroll revealed that she had an out-of-body experience as she watched the jury forewoman hand over the verdict, which was then read by the court clerk.
“The clerk opens it up, reads it, frowns, shakes his head, folds it back up, and then hands it to Judge [Lewis] Kaplan,” she said. “And Judge Kaplan opens it up, and his eyebrows rise up towards his hairline, and he frowns, and he says, ‘Madame forewoman, what does the M stand for?’”
The forewoman then said the “m” stood for “million.”
“That was a moment,” Carroll said. “I left my body. As I say, I felt like Peter Pan who flies around the ceilings. And quite frankly, I’ve never come down from that. That win was so enormous and so powerful, not for me, not for Robbie, but for everybody in the country who had sort of lost hope that he could ever be beaten.”
Carroll said her attorney—who has no relation to the judge—”decimated” Trump, who suffered a fresh blow just last month when a federal appellate court denied his bid to overturn the $83 million verdict.
“We’re still feeling the good victory of that. It’s happened. And we’ve proved—Robbie proved, and I proved—that Trump can be beaten,” Carroll said. “He can be beaten.”
Contacted for comment, the White House referred the inquiry to Trump’s personal lawyers. The Daily Beast has reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, currently led by Habba, and the law firm Madaio Eyet & Associates, where she used to work.
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