Carroll Judge Tells Trump It's Time To Pay Up, Rapist

Rapist better have my money.

Yesterday Judge Lewis Kaplan made it official, entering the jury’s judgment into the record and ordering Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her and lying about raping her in 1996. After hundreds of public insults, the years of abuse spewed on social media have finally stopped as it finally occurred to Trump that lies have a cost.

Maybe that cost could one day include a custodial sentence??? A girl can dream.

The jury rendered its verdict on January 26, but Judge Kaplan still had some pressing matters to attend to before making it official. And by pressing matters, we mean curbstomping Trump’s obnoxious lawyer Alina Habba one last time.

Habba’s pretrial shenanigans over the past two years got the judge good and pissed, but her over-the-top courtroom antics, not to mention rank incompetence at trial, put her in a class of one.

Rules of Evidence? Suggestions of Schmevidence, amirite?

During the trial, Habba got Carroll to admit on the witness stand that she’d deleted some death threats in 2019 when her initial allegation became public. Habba promptly moved for a mistrial in the presence of the jury on the theory that Carroll had deleted evidence. The court told her to knock it off and ordered the jury to disregard her comments. Nevertheless, she persisted, filing a motion renewing her request just days later. Judge Kaplan ignored it then, because SHUT UP, NO ONE HAS TIME FOR THIS SHIT.

But this week, the judge had the time!

In a roaring opinion he reminded Trump’s lawyer that the time to seek discovery sanctions is when the deficiency is discovered, i.e. during discovery. You can’t sit on the information for a year and then try to gotcha your opponent with it during trial. That is not a thing. That’s why the statutory remedy for such a failure to preserve evidence is a default judgment or sanctions, not a mistrial.

“Granting a mistrial would have been entirely pointless,” Judge Kaplan explained, as if to an obstreperous child.

“Had a mistrial been declared here, it would not have remedied any improper disposal of electronic communications, if any there was. It would not have ended this case. It simply would have required dismissal of the jury, the selection of a new jury, and the recommencement of the trial. The issue of whether the defendant would be entitled to any relief for any improper disposal of electronic communications would have carried forward, unresolved, into the second trial. Declaring a mistrial would have served no useful purpose.”

But even if this motion had been filed a year ago during discovery, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) makes it clear that the party seeking sanctions has to prove that her opponent: (1) anticipated litigation; (2) “acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation”; and (3) that the loss of the information prejudiced the opponent.

In deposition testimony, Carroll described being alone in her house late at night on the Friday that her accusations went public, and watching the threats roll in. During the first trial, she testified:

“When I see messages like that, it's — my brain reacts, and my body reacts. Like it's going to happen right now. And so the heart races. My pulse was up. My senses heighten. And in order to get rid of that horrible feeling of the heart racing and, you know, my — I became hyperaware. I just delete, delete, delete. It really helped me, you know, get control of the situation.”

And since Carroll didn’t contemplate suing Trump until months later, Habba was shit out of luck. There’s also the inconvenient fact that Local Civil Rule 37.2 dictates that “No motion … shall be heard unless counsel for the moving party has first requested an informal conference with the Court by letter-motion … and such request has either been denied or the discovery dispute has not been resolved as a consequence of such a conference.” Whoopsie doodle!

TL, DR? Your arguments are terrible and you should be bloody embarrassed to have made them.

So, no, Trump is not getting a mistrial. And he’s got 30 days from the date of yesterday’s judgment before Carroll can move to collect against his assets. When he appeals, he can hold off collections by posting the entire amount in the form of cash or a bond with the court. In the first trial, he ponied up the $5 million out of pocket. But $83.3 million is a lot of money, even for a “billionaire” who’s using PAC money to pay his legal bills.

And in the meanwhile, just down the block from Judge Kaplan’s chambers, Justice Arthur Engoron is working on his verdict in the civil fraud trial. The New York Attorney General wants a $370 million fine for the Trump Org’s eleventy-seven fraudulent financial statements. As The Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery points out, the interest rate under state law is 9 percent per year, and it’s retrospective to the commencement of the investigation in 2018. Which isn’t chump change unless your name is Jeff Bezos.

Pay up, asshole. And keep this hero’s name out of your filthy mouth forever.

[Carroll v. Trump, Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.