By Benjamin Hong, Features Editor
On January 26, 2024, a jury awarded Elizabeth Jean Carroll over 80 million dollars in damages inflicted by defamatory statements made by former president Donald Trump following her publicly alleging he sexually assaulted her in 1996. Carroll is an American journalist, author and advice columnist behind Elle magazine’s “Ask E. Jean” advice column, one of the longest-running ever. The result of Carroll’s case has been lauded as a statement of the worth of an older woman’s voice and as a major blow against the former president by his naysayers.
Carroll and former president Trump first came into legal conflict after Trump repeatedly denied allegations levied against him by Carroll in her 2019 book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, which stated that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a New York department store’s dressing room. After Trump’s denials, which included a quickly debunked statement that the two had never even met and calling Carroll a dishonest political operative, Carroll filed a defamation suit against Trump with the New York Supreme Court in November of 2019, testifying that his denials “shattered [her] reputation” (at the time, she was unable to sue him for the assault itself, as the statute of limitations barred her from doing so). The proceedings faced difficulties due to Trump being the incumbent president at the time, with DOJ lawyers arguing that public comments such as those made against Carroll fell within the scope of his duties, but in October 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan cleared the way, and on May 9, 2023, the jury reached a unanimous decision. The verdict was as follows: Carroll had proven Trump had sexually abused her (she had not proven he had raped her), and that Trump had defamed Carroll. She was awarded a total of five million dollars in damages.
On May 22, 2023, Carroll amended her previous defamation suit against Trump, adding on comments Trump had made against her both on a CNN town hall and Truth Social after the first trial had concluded (during the former, Trump referred to Carroll as a “whack job” with a “fake story”). These statements were ruled to be “substantially similar” to the statements covered in the previous trial, and as a result of this on September 6, 2023, Judge Kaplan granted Carroll partial summary judgment (defined by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute as “a judgment entered by a court for one party and against another party without a full trial”) and prevented Trump from contesting the veracity of Carroll’s claims of sexual assault. Carroll sought a minimum of 10 million dollars in damages, and on January 26, 2024, the jury awarded Carroll a combined sum of 83.3 million dollars.
Given the politically charged nature of virtually anything the former president involves himself with, it is no surprise that many of his opponents celebrated his sizable loss. Democratic operative Jon Cooper crowed on X that “Trump is so screwed,” and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson smugly wrote that “Trump’s gonna need to sell some more hats.”
Shrihaan Chaudhary, a junior at River Hill, did not share this same sentiment, expressing that the far likelier outcome would be that “like any other Donald Trump controversy, it will attract bad press for him, and continue to lower his reputation in the eyes of those who don’t like him, and the people who already support Trump will continue to support him, as he has so far already been involved in 5 sexual misconduct cases.” While the Carroll verdict will, if precedent is any indication, lack a definite political impact for the upcoming presidential election, that does not invalidate its broader importance. Cases such as this that lack a broadly felt impact may be less salient in the public eye, but as Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University, put it in a New York Times interview, what makes this case so important is Carroll’s advanced age. At the time of her accusations, Carroll was nearing 80, and the proclamation that her professional and personal reputation was still worth something at that age made her claim, in Tuerkheimer’s words “all the more radical.” That is, ultimately, the message of the E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump cases: Everyone has worth, and every voice, no matter how unconventional, will be heard.