After his first victory in the primaries | Trump appears in New York on defamation charges

(New York) Building on his triumph in the Republican primaries in Iowa and before a key election in New Hampshire, Donald Trump returns Wednesday to his defamation trial in New York brought by an author who had already had him convicted in 2023 for a sexual assault in the 1990s.

“I’m going to come back to New York this evening and I’ll go to one of these fake cases tomorrow morning. This is my program for the next four, five days,” said the former President of the United States on Tuesday evening at a campaign rally in the small state of New Hampshire, in the frigid and snowy northeast of the country.

More than ever a favorite in the Republican Party primaries after dominating the Iowa caucus in the Midwest on Monday, the 77-year-old tribune and billionaire spent his Tuesday at the Manhattan courthouse to face a former magazine columnist American SheElizabeth Jean Carroll, 80 years old.

According to the judicial press which had access to the courtroom of the federal civil court in New York, the two protagonists did not exchange a glance during the day, devoted to the selection of a civil jury of nine people .

“Barely believable”

If Mr. Trump remained silent in the courtroom, he attacked Mr.^me Carroll on his social network Truth Social: “It’s hard to believe that I have to defend myself against this woman’s bogus story,” he wrote, republishing old clips of television interviews and messages on the social networks of his accuser.

“I have never seen this woman in my life […] I have no idea who she is,” Donald Trump reaffirmed last week about the writer, continuing to call her a liar, or “crazy,” despite her resounding civil conviction last May to him. pay $5 million for “sexual assault” in 1996 and defamation in 2022.

Targeted by at least six civil and criminal trials, the real estate magnate 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.

” Early in the morning [ce mercredi] I’m going to a Biden witch hunt. And then I will come back here in the afternoon, we will make speeches and we will pocket the votes,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in the town of Atkinson, New Hampshire, the state where the Republican primaries will take place on January 23.

The defamation trial is expected to last several days, but is limited in substance and in time, because Mr. Trump has already been declared responsible for the facts with which he is accused by Mr.^me 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 $5 million in damages.

Rape

But^me Carroll also filed a defamation complaint for previous statements by Donald Trump in June 2019, following 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 proceedings had been delayed by procedural battles, but this second trial was maintained.

A sign of the political tensions surrounding Mr. Trump’s legal setbacks, Judge Lewis Kaplan (who is not related to Mr. Trump’s lawyer^me Carroll Roberta Kaplan) imposed anonymity on the jurors. He also warned that “the only issue at stake at trial will be the harm caused to M^me Carroll by the comments” which he already considers “defamatory”, “false”, and “malicious”.

E. Jean Carroll is seeking at least $10 million for her moral and professional damages.

And this trial, before those in the coming months, will once again raise the question of the behavior towards women of Donald Trump, accused several times of sexual assault, but never criminally convicted.