President Donald Trump will soon have to face the consequences for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll, her lawyer predicted.
The president has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million verdict that a jury awarded Carroll in May 2023, but the justices are not likely to take the case, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in Tuesday’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
“There’s nothing in that case that’s SCOTUS worthy,” she told host Joanna Coles.
The case has been appealed on evidentiary issues, with Trump’s lawyers arguing that the district judge should not have allowed a woman to testify about Trump accosting and assaulting her on an airplane in 1979.
Usually, lawyers cannot introduce prior “bad acts” as evidence of a specific wrongdoing, but the federal rules of evidence were specifically amended to allow that type of testimony in sexual assault cases, Kaplan explained.
The Supreme Court typically doesn’t take these types of evidentiary questions, particularly in civil cases, she said. In Trump’s case, there’s even less reason to add the case to the Supreme Court docket because of the federal appellate court’s findings, she added.
“Here, the Second Circuit concluded that even if the court had been incorrect in admitting her testimony, it’s what’s called ‘harmless error’ because we had another 10 or 11 witnesses, and they had zero,” Kaplan said.
The appellate court ruled that even if the testimony was improperly admitted, it didn’t change the case’s outcome.
“That’s why I’m pretty confident [the Supreme Court justices] won’t take it,” Kaplan said.
Carroll has successfully sued Trump twice after he sexually abused her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City.
After Carroll described the attack in 2019 in a New York magazine article and in her book What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, Trump accused her of lying and said he had never met her.
Carroll then sued Trump for defamation, and eventually received the $5 million judgment.
In 2022, while the first case was ongoing, Trump accused Carroll in a Truth Social post of inventing the encounter to sell books.
The author filed a second suit for defamation and added a claim for sexual battery under the newly passed Adult Survivors Act, which allowed sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond the expired statute of limitations.
That jury found Trump liable in 2024 for $83.3 million, which Kaplan called the big verdict, she told Coles.
The case is about a year behind the first case in terms of making its way through the appeals process, Kaplan said.
The $5 million for the first verdict has been sitting in an account held by the court, accruing interest. If the Supreme Court rejects Trump’s appeal, Carroll will finally receive the money, Kaplan said.
Carroll told Coles she wants to give most of the money to “everything Donald Trump hates,” including efforts to strengthen women’s reproductive rights and voting rights.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Trump’s outside counsel for comment.
The post Why SCOTUS Is Finally About to Deal Trump a Stinging Blow appeared first on The Daily Beast.
