Donald Trump Dares Jurors To Think Of A Number Higher Than Infinity In E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case

You can always add one more ... and they will!

UPDATE 4:48 p.m.: Is $83 million higher than “infinity”? It’s close!

Donald Trump had already lost the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial before it started.

Trump walked into the courthouse last week branded a rapist, after the jury in the first trial found him liable for sexually assaulting and defaming the beloved advice columnist. The entire purpose of the second trial was to determine how big a check he’d have to cut her for damages. And yet, somehow he and his lawyers managed to make things worse.

His lawyer Alina Habba, who spent the past three years pissing off Judge Lewis Kaplan, began the trial by lying about Trump’s plans in an effort to get a postponement, claiming that he’d be traveling last Wednesday, en route to his mother-in-law’s funeral on Thursday. In fact he spent Wednesday evening at a campaign rally in New Hampshire. She followed that up with multiple requests for a mistrial based on her claim that Carroll deleted evidence. Without getting too deep in the weeds on this one, you can’t store up an alleged discovery violation for years on end, and then GOTCHA the witness and demand that the court end the case. That is not a thing!

As her client muttered loudly in court, Habba made repeated reference to excluded evidence, forcing Judge Kaplan to admonish her and instruct the jury to disregard her comments.

She was also hilariously TERRIBLE at her job.

The above exchange was part of an effort to impeach Carroll by proving that she once said she moved to New York because Montana was boring. LOCK HER UP!

She seemed consistently confused by the basic rules of evidence, to the great amusement of lawyers everywhere.

“No, we are not going to read out loud a document not yet in evidence,” the infuriated judge barked last Wednesday. “We are going to take a break right here to 3:30 and you're going to refresh your memory about how you get a document in.”

This morning, the court actually warned Habba that she was “on the verge of spending some time in the lockup” after she once again flouted the court’s prior evidentiary rulings.

Bet the jury is mad impressed!

But aside from her procedural confusion, the former president’s lawyer has embraced several interesting legal theories which are unlikely to endear her to the panel.

First, her main argument was that THE BITCH DESERVED IT. (It’s kind of her thing.) She insisted that the avalanche of death threats and harassment were a result of Carroll’s claims of being assaulted by the former president, not because Trump called her a liar.

Second, she claimed that Carroll had a duty to mitigate damages by shutting down her Twitter account and going to ground, and thus it was her fault that Trump’s fans threatened to kill her.

“If you were so damaged, why didn't you stop going on TV?” Habba sneered.

Third, Habba is a slut-shaming asshole. Echoing her boss, who spent the entire trial posting Carroll’s old tweets promoting her advice column, Habba tried to convince the jurors that a woman who talked frankly about anal sex and making passes at men either couldn’t be raped or couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about sexual assault. On the same day she attempted to force Carroll to read a tweet calling her a “pathetic old hag,” Habba assured the panel that Carroll was “not afraid of porn.”

Do jurors appreciate watching an 80-year-old rape victim get bullied by a preening twit? Guess we’re about to find out.

Carroll’s lawyers, led by Roberta Kaplan, were as competent in this trial as in the last. They pointed out that the purpose of punitive damages is to make the defamation stop. Then they played video of Trump continuing to defame Carroll, juxtaposed with tapes of him bragging about how many billions of dollars he has in depositions from his civil fraud trial. Remember that insane lie about Mar-a-Lago being worth $1.5 billion? Well, he’s stuck with that now!

In a giant middle finger to the jury and the court, Trump got up and ostentatiously walked out during the plaintiff’s close, a gross breach of decorum footstomped for the jurors’ benefit by Judge Kaplan noting it aloud for the record.

In rebuttal, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley highlighted the filthiness of Trump’s argument.

“Donald Trump is saying, She asked for it. I have to ask: are you really still doing that? Have we not moved on? I think we have,” she told the jury.

I think we have, too. And I think there will be a stratospheric verdict against Donald Trump issued some time Monday.

[Carroll v. Trump I, Docket via Court Listener / Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos Substack.