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One day after claiming victory in the Iowa caucus, former President Donald Trump was back in a New York courtroom for a trial to determine how much he owes writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her days after she publicly accused him of rape.
Opening statements are set to begin following jury selection, which started Tuesday morning, according to CNN. The trial is expected to take three to five days.
Jurors will be tasked with determining how much Trump will have to pay Carroll after a federal judge found that he defamed the former magazine columnist in 2019 when he said she made up her sexual assault allegations to sell her memoir or for political reasons.
“It’s a totally false accusation. I have absolutely no idea who she is,” he said one day after Carroll went public with her claims. “There were numerous cases where women were paid money to say bad things about me. … And those women did wrong things – that women were actually paid money to say bad things about me.”
In court on Tuesday, Trump attempted to get court proceedings suspended to allow for him to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. Former first lady Melania Trump announced her mother’s passing in a social media post on Jan. 9.
Kaplan denied the request, according to the AP.
Last year, jurors found Trump liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a dressing room at a luxury department store in New York City in the 1990s and defaming her in a 2022 social media post in which he claimed she was lying and that he did not know her. The jury ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million as part of the case.
Trump did not attend court proceedings in the case, the AP reported.
In September, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found Trump’s 2019 statements to be “substantially the same” as the 2022 statement reviewed by the jury and said their verdict “plainly established that Mr. Trump’s 2019 statements were false.”
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and maintains that he did not know Carroll. He has appealed the jury’s decision, according to the AP.
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