Trump sat in the courtroom for every day of the trial except one, when he attended his mother-in-law’s funeral. He also testified on Thursday, a marked shift from the first trial when he declined to show up at all. He was on the stand for just three minutes, during which he said he stood “100 percent” behind his deposition denying that he had assaulted Carroll or even met her before.
Trump was not, however, present in the courtroom when the verdict was read out. As it turns out, all his protestations didn’t change the facts of the matter. This trial was only to set damages, after presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in September that since Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse, his comments are by default defamatory.
Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. Her first lawsuit against him was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in November 2022.