Donald Trump’s new shuttle between his Republican primary campaign and the courts: the former American president returned Wednesday to his civil trial in New York for defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who ordered the billionaire to pay civil damages for sexual assault.
Returning Tuesday evening to Manhattan from a crowded meeting in Atkinson, in the small frosty and snowy state of New Hampshire (north-east) where the primaries will take place on January 23, the 77-year-old tycoon and tribune left his “Trump Tower » and sat down Wednesday morning in the courtroom of the civil court in the south of the Big Island of New York, according to AFP photographers.
The former columnist for the American magazine Elle, E. Jean Carroll, 80, also arrived at the courthouse.
She faces for the second day the man she accuses of having raped her in 1996 and whom she finally had found responsible in civil court, during a first trial last May in New York, for “sexual assault » in the 1990s and defamation in 2022. Donald Trump was ordered to pay five million dollars in damages.
“Crazy” and “phony”
Despite this court decision, Donald Trump continues to denigrate and insult E. Jean Carroll on social networks, described as a “crazy” woman with a “phony story” and whom he says he has “never seen (his life”.
More than ever a favorite in the Republican Party primaries after dominating the Iowa caucus in the Midwest on Monday, the billionaire has already spent his day on Tuesday in the courtroom without exchanging a glance with the author.
Targeted by at least six civil and criminal trials, the real estate mogul has transformed each of his indictments or appearances into a political platform, multiplying virulent invectives against the justice system and the Democratic camp of President Joe Biden, whom he accuses of wanting to to be convicted to prevent him from winning the presidential election in November.
He repeated to his supporters Tuesday evening that his successor in the White House was leading “a witch hunt” and that he would return to campaign Wednesday evening in New Hampshire in order to “pocket votes” in the January 23 election. .
The defamation trial is expected to last several days, but is limited in substance and in time because Donald Trump had already been declared responsible for the facts with which he is accused by E. Jean Carroll.
On May 9, 2023, a jury of the same court unanimously decided that he had committed a “sexual assault” on E. Jean Carroll, in 1996, in a fitting room of a New York department store, and that he had also defamed her in October 2022. The jurors had sentenced Donald Trump, who appealed and was never criminally prosecuted in this case, to five million dollars in damages.
Rape
But E. Jean Carroll had also filed a complaint for defamation for previous statements by Donald Trump, in June 2019, in the wake of his first accusations of rape contained in a book.
Then President of the United States (2017-2021), he claimed that the author, who was “not his type”, had invented everything to “sell a new book”. The procedure had been delayed by procedural battles, but this second trial was maintained, and also examines his comments since the first judgment in 2023.
E. Jean Carroll is seeking at least ten million dollars for her moral and professional damage.
And this trial, before those in the coming months, raises more generally the question of Donald Trump’s behavior towards women, after numerous accusations of sexual assault never brought to trial in criminal proceedings.
