How Carroll v. Trump revealed #MeToo era’s impact

Asked about his “Access Hollywood” tape, the clip of him speaking flippantly about celebrities and sexual abuse of women that surfaced just prior to the 2016 election, former President Donald Trump explained his thinking.

Yes, on the tape he’d said that if you’re a “star” you can “do anything,” Mr. Trump acknowledged in his deposition last fall for writer E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault and defamation lawsuit against him. Historically that’s been the case, he said.

“I guess that’s been largely true. ... Unfortunately or fortunately,” he said.

On Tuesday, a New York jury replied, in essence, “Not so fast. It’s not going to be true for this case, at least.”

The finding of the six men and three women of a federal jury on Tuesday that Mr. Trump is liable for sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll in the 1990s, and defaming her since by calling her a liar, is a serious legal defeat for a man who once sat in the Oval Office and wants to do so again.

But in some ways, it may be more than that, say some experts. It could also be a marker for how the law and courts have evolved in recent years to make it less difficult – though perhaps still not easy – for women to tell their stories of assault and be believed.

“I think this verdict is a teachable moment for America. It demonstrates that jurors will believe survivors who bring sexual assault cases many years after the incident, because of the very real dynamics that deter them from coming forward,” says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan.

A civil lawsuit

The Carroll lawsuit involves civil charges, unlike the historic criminal indictment of Mr. Trump last month by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on charges related to the payment of hush money to a porn star. Civil trials adjudicate disputes between people or organizations and don’t result in sentences of prison or parole. In the vast majority of cases, judgments against defendants result in money changing hands.

On Tuesday, after only three hours of deliberation, that is what the jury decided should happen. It ruled that Mr. Trump should pay around $5 million in damages to Ms. Carroll for sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store sometime in the mid-1990s, and later using harsh language to call her a liar after she made her assault allegations public in a 2019 book.

The jury did not find that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll, as she had charged.

After the verdict, Mr. Trump continued to insist that the assault had never occurred and that he would press for the ruling to be overturned.

“I have no idea who this woman, who made a false and totally fabricated accusation, is. Hopefully justice will be served on appeal!” Mr. Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social.

The former president has also continued to criticize federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan, calling him “completely biased” and “terrible.” Meanwhile, he has begun to raise money off the verdict. One fundraising letter emailed to supporters Wednesday morning said that the U.S. justice system has been hijacked by sinister political forces and Mr. Trump’s “freedom and justice did not matter to the Marxists who orchestrated this witch hunt in a city where the voter registration of the jury pool favors Democrats 7:1.”

A clash of two eras

The trial of Ms. Carroll’s accusations against Mr. Trump played out in the courtroom almost as a clash of two eras – the time before the #MeToo movement, and the time after.

As New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg put it, “The trial itself was a test of how much #MeToo has changed the culture.”

The New York state law under which Ms. Carroll was able to pursue damages for a decades-old incident was itself something of a #MeToo artifact. Under the Adult Survivors Act, which took effect late last year, victims of sexual abuse have until November 2023 to file civil complaints against their alleged abusers.

During the trial, Ms. Carroll’s lawyers took pains to explain to the jury why someone such as their client might have remained silent about abuse for years, afraid that they would not be believed and their allegations ridiculed. They talked about how victims of violence can remember some things vividly, and other things not at all – and how their reactions can vary in later years.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, ran what might have been a textbook defense against sexual assault allegations in the 1990s, long before the pathbreaking rape prosecutions of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and comedian Bill Cosby.

Mr. Tacopina bored in on why Ms. Carroll had kept quiet so long, why she had not gone to the police at the time, and whether she thought rape was “sexy.”

He asked directly why she hadn’t screamed.

Ms. Carroll said she had tried to push Mr. Trump off her, stomped on his foot, hit him with her handbag, and tried to knee him.

“I was in too much of a panic to scream,” she testified. “I was fighting.”

In the end, the jury did not accept the old stereotype that an assault victim would surely scream as loudly as possible, behave in predictable ways, and run to law enforcement.

“The verdict ... demonstrates that the focus should not be on whether the survivor screamed or resisted, but on the misconduct of the assailant,” says Professor McQuade.

The 2024 presidential campaign

When Mr. Trump was indicted in early April by Mr. Bragg, his standing within the Republican Party strengthened. Voters who previously might have been leaning toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or other possible GOP standard-bearers turned toward the former president, perhaps in solidarity against perceived Democratic overreach. Mr. Trump quickly built a solid nomination lead.

It’s difficult to predict whether that will happen again – or indeed, what will happen to Mr. Trump’s standing with the larger electorate. The Carroll verdict is the ending of a case, not a beginning. It involves ugly behavior. But it was a civil trial, a lawsuit – not a prosecution with the threat of prison at the end.

Mr. Trump survived the “Access Hollywood” tape once before, when it came out just prior to the 2016 vote. Some top Republicans thought his crude comments would doom him in the general election, and that he should drop out.

Journalist Robert Costa, then with The Washington Post, interviewed Mr. Trump the morning after the “Access” tape broke. On Wednesday he posted his memories of the encounter on Twitter. Mr. Trump was “flippant” and “short,” wrote Mr. Costa, who is now with CBS News.

When Mr. Costa asked about the issues raised by the tape, Mr. Trump kept talking about his core voters, focused on what he would say to them that day. He seemed bored by any discussion of moral or political consequences.

At the end of the interview Mr. Trump emphasized that he would never quit the race. “Forget that. That’s not my deal,” he said, according to Mr. Costa.