Seth Wenig/AP, left. Alex Brandon/AP, right.
- Donald Trump will face a second trial this week for E. Jean Carroll's rape claims.
- A jury already found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation last year.
- Carroll's first defamation lawsuit took longer to go to trial and will focus only on damages.
Former President Donald Trump will once again go to trial over his sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll.
Hot off the heels of a completed fraud trial brought against the Trump Organization by the New York Attorney General's office, the Carroll trial kicks off the first of several criminal and civil trials that Trump will have to face as he runs in the 2024 presidential election.
The trial will begin with jury selection on Tuesday, January 16, in Manhattan federal court and is expected to last about three days.
Here's what to expect from the second Carroll trial:
Why is Trump going to trial again for Carroll's allegations, anyway?
Carroll has filed two lawsuits against Trump over claims that he raped her in the mid-1990s in a Manhattan department store near Trump Tower.
This trial is actually for her first lawsuit, which was filed back in 2019.
Carroll alleged that Trump defamed her by calling her a liar when he denied raping her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store. Trump claimed he never met Carroll and didn't even know who she was, even though they had been photographed together.
Because Trump was president when he made those statements, the case became stalled over legal questions of whether he had legal immunity for making them.
Trump, however, kept criticizing Carroll anyway. In October of 2022— after he left the presidency — he once again denied raping Carroll, called her a liar, and insulted her appearance.
By that time, New York had passed The Adult Survivors Act, a law forged in the #MeToo era. It opened a one-year window allowing sexual misconduct accusers to bring civil lawsuits that the statute of limitations would otherwise bar. Carroll was among the first women to file an Adult Survivors Act lawsuit against a high-profile defendant. Her November 2022 lawsuit accused Trump of both rape and defamation. (The Adult Survivors Act window closed in November of 2023, which is why you saw a rush of sexual misconduct cases reported in the press — including involving Diddy and Jamie Foxx — before the deadline.)
The second lawsuit went to trial first, in the Spring of 2022. Carroll testified, as did two friends she confided in in the 1990s.
Trump never showed up, though a deposition video of him was played to jurors. His attorneys argued that Carroll and her friends essentially had Trump derangement syndrome and cooked up the story because of their left-leaning politics.
Jurors sided with Carroll, finding that Trump defamed her and owed $5 million.
However, they did not find that Trump likely raped Carroll, but rather that he sexually abused her — a distinction Trump's lawyers held up as a victory.
Under the definitions of New York penal law that jurors were given, the distinction was between Trump inserting his penis into Carroll (which would be rape) or if he only inserted something else into her (which would be sexual abuse).
Carroll testified that she believed Trump, pinning her against the wall of a changing room, inserted his fingers into her genitalia before doing the same with his penis. At the trial, Trump's attorney Joe Tacopina, in cross-examination of Carroll and closing arguments, made much ado about the height difference between Carroll and Trump and the ostensibly challenging physics of Trump getting his penis into Carroll's genitalia.
Meanwhile, the first Carroll lawsuit hung in abeyance. In July, the Justice Department — which blocked the lawsuit from moving forward during the Trump administration — found that Trump's denials of Carroll's rape claims were personal rather than part of his official duties.
"Although the statements themselves were made in a work context, the allegations that prompted the statements related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades prior to Mr. Trump's Presidency," the Justice Department lawyer wrote. "That sexual assault was obviously not job-related."
The legal filing meant that the Justice Department would no longer stand in the way of the case going to trial.
Trump's lawyers made another effort to stop the lawsuit from moving forward, going to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to argue he should be immune from the case.
The appeals court disagreed, allowing the January 16 trial to move forward.
It sounds like a jury already decided Trump sexually abused Carroll. Why a second trial?
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presides over both Carroll cases, basically agrees with you — to a point.
He ruled that Trump doesn't get a re-do on Carroll's sexual abuse claims. Trump defamed Carroll, he ruled, and the jury's job is only to decide how much Trump owes in damages for the statements he made defaming Carroll while in the White House.
Carroll added additional claims to her lawsuit, too. After Trump lost the first trial, he called the case "rigged" and disparaged Carroll as a "whack job." Carroll's lawyers slapped additional defamation allegations into her lawsuit for those statements.
Even up to the week before the trial, Trump has continued to attack Carroll on his Truth Social account and denies ever meeting her, despite the jury's finding that he sexually abused her.
Kaplan also ruled that it was fine for Carroll's lawyers to say that Trump "raped" Carroll. Even if the jurors in the first trial didn't believe Trump's actions fit the definition of "rape" under New York penal law, he still did so with the ordinary definition of the law, Kaplan said.
"The finding that Ms. 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. "Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that."
Will Trump attend the trial this time?
It looks like it. At a press conference following closing arguments in a different Trump trial, the former president told journalists he would attend the Carroll trial.
Trump has little wiggle room in the case. The judge has issued a series of orders constraining arguments Trump wanted to make, including about the lack of DNA evidence (Trump delayed providing it), Carroll's past romantic relationships (the judge says it's irrelevant), or suggesting Carroll's claims are fake (that's what the first trial was for).
Kaplan also blocked Trump from bringing his own proposed expert witness, public relations professional Charles Malkus, because he took too long to bring him forward.
Trump's lawyers will still, though, have the opportunity to cross-examine Carroll's expert witness, Ashlee Humphries, who testified in the first trial.
Humphries also testified as an expert witness last month in Rudy Giuliani's defamation trial, where the jury came up with a massive $148 million verdict.