District Judge Lewis Kaplan has said it multiple times: Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Kaplan wrote it in May 2023, when he presided over one of the trials against Trump. And he reminded jurors of the rape this week, during the latest proceedings in the multi-layered, winding rape and defamation cases brought against Trump by Carroll.
A few factors:
Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan made it a point to strategically and repeatedly use Trump’s claims of being a multi-billionaire against him, including in his opening statement where he asked the jury to return punitive damages that would be sure to stop further defamation based on his self-attested net worth.
After seeing the amount that the jury returned in the Ruby and Shay Moss case against Rudy Giuliani I think that it is reasonable to expect this jury to weigh that in their deliberations, and return a similar or even greater amount in this case due to the actual finding of rape.
Everybody wants to be king for a day, and jury’s historically punish the fuck out of their peers when they feel they are being disrespectful towards the victim, the court, or the jury itself. In this case I would expect them to throw the book at Trump to make a statement about the power of the jury system in the United States.
I am confident in saying that the award for punitive damages in this case will be far greater than most are expecting. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was even more than $150 million. You can come back here and tell me I’m a moron if I got this totally wrong, but I don’t think I do.
Considering Alex Jones’ judgment was $1 billion (not that he’s even pretended to pay any of it), I think caps are off the table.
I’ll put the under-over at 250M
Not even counting that he’s acting like a spoiled cunt during the proceedings, in full display to the jury
So more like $400M
The jury is free to return so much more (or less, heaven forbid!) than sought.