22 Jul 2023 4:48 pm
On Wednesday, a federal judge confirmed that a jury ruled that the former President of the United States was a rapist.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump requested a new trial or reduced damages after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll, and awarded her $5 million.
Trump’s legal team argued that since the jury did not find him liable for raping Carroll, the verdict was “grossly excessive.” But U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan slapped down that argument.
The GOP scarcely blinks, but none of this was inevitable.
“The finding that Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.
The judge explained that New York’s legal definition of the term is “far narrower” than the word “rape” is understood in “common modern parlance.”
“Indeed,” he added, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan's ruling was unambiguous and blunt. “Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” he wrote.
“The proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”