A New York jury found on Tuesday that Donald Trump sexually abused the advice columnist E Jean Carroll in a New York department store changing room 27 years ago.
The writer, Carroll had claimed that that the one-time real estate mogul raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s in a civil battery and defamation case.
The verdict was read out in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after jurors began deliberating following a seven-day civil trial.
While not finding Trump guilty of rape, the panel of six men and three women also found that Trump injured advice columnist Carroll in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and defamed her when he called her a liar.
Carroll was awarded about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages: about $2m on the sexual abuse count and close to $3m for defamation.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has denied the allegations and of even knowing Carroll all that well, referred to the decades old matter as ‘a complete con job.’
In typical Trump fashion, the defendant claimed that former Elle magazine columnist Carroll simply made up the attack in a Bergdorf’s dressing room and went public in 2017 at to pump up sales of her 2019 memoir.
