What to Know as Trump Faces Another Defamation Trial by E. Jean Carroll

NEW YORK — A Manhattan jury is expected to begin considering Tuesday how much money former President Donald Trump will have to pay writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of raping her nearly three decades ago.

Trump is planning to attend the first day of the trial before he heads to New Hampshire to campaign before the presidential primary there next week. He was expected to fly to New York late Monday night from Iowa, where the first-in-the-nation caucuses were held that evening.

Carroll, 80, has said she encountered Trump in the mid-1990s at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, where he shoved her against a dressing room wall and forced himself on her. Trump, 77, has loudly denied the allegations ever since Carroll first leveled them more than four years ago.

The civil trial focuses on statements by Trump in June 2019 after Carroll revealed her allegation in New York magazine. Trump called her claim “totally false,” saying that he had never met Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, and that she had invented a story to sell a book.

The trial is the second in eight months in which Carroll will face off against the former president. In May, a jury awarded her just over $2 million after finding Trump liable for sexually assaulting her in the dressing room and nearly $3 million for defamation when he wrote on his Truth Social website in October 2022 that her claim was a “complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”

Trump, who is on a quest for the Republican presidential nomination, has said for weeks that he wanted to attend Carroll’s trial and to testify. His comments sparked a bitter dispute between Carroll’s and Trump’s lawyers over what the former president could say if he were to take the stand, and whether he would stray beyond strict boundaries the judge had set.

Here’s what to know about the case:

Courtroom Curtain Call

The judge, Lewis Kaplan of U.S. District Court, has ruled that, given the jury’s findings in the first trial, Trump cannot now contest Carroll’s version of the events that occurred in the dressing room — as he frequently does in public statements.

“Mr. Trump is precluded from offering any testimony, evidence or argument suggesting or implying that he did not sexually assault Ms. Carroll, that she fabricated her account of the assault or that she had any motive to do so,” Kaplan wrote in an opinion Jan. 9.

The judge previously ruled that Carroll did not need to prove again that Trump’s comments in 2019 were defamatory, finding that they were substantially the same as the statements that prompted last year’s award.

“This trial will not be a ‘do-over’ of the previous trial,” Kaplan said Jan. 9.

Double Punishment

Despite the jury’s total award of $5 million against Trump in May, his attacks against Carroll did not stop.

The former president continues to relentlessly lash out at her — on Truth Social, on the campaign trail and in a news conference Thursday after he attended the final day of a civil fraud trial brought against him in state court by the New York attorney general. Trump told reporters that he would attend Carroll’s trial, “and I’m going to explain I don’t know who the hell she is.”

In the trial starting Tuesday, Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages for harm to her reputation, plus an unspecified amount of punitive damages, which are intended to punish and to deter misconduct. Legal experts have said that a substantial punitive damages award may be the most effective way for Carroll to try to silence Trump.

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, and Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, have each declined in recent days to comment on the case.

What Happened at Bergdorf Goodman

Carroll testified in the spring that the attack at Bergdorf’s came after she bumped into Trump one evening and he asked her to help buy a present for a female friend.

They ended up in the lingerie section, where he motioned her to a dressing room, shut the door and began assaulting her. Using his weight to pin her, he pulled down her tights and forced his fingers and then, she said, his penis into her vagina. The jury did not, however, find that he had raped her.

Kaplan has ruled that because the jury found that Trump had used his fingers to assault her, her rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .