Jury Selected in 2nd Trump Defamation Trial Brought by E. Jean Carroll

Hours after Donald J. Trump cemented his political standing with a romp through the caucus rooms of Iowa, he arrived Tuesday morning in his other world: a courtroom.

The former president’s motorcade drove through wet snow to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, where he rode to the 26th floor. There, a jury was selected to hear arguments in a trial over how much money, if any, the former president would have to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of raping her nearly three decades ago.

Ms. Carroll, 80, has said she encountered Mr. Trump in the mid-1990s at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, where he shoved her against a dressing room wall and forced himself on her. Mr. Trump, 77, has vigorously denied those allegations ever since Ms. Carroll first leveled them more than four years ago.

The trial is the second in eight months in which Ms. Carroll will face off against the former president. Last May, a jury awarded her just over $2 million after finding Mr. Trump liable for sexually assaulting her in the dressing room and nearly $3 million for defamation when he called her story a lie.

The civil trial that began on Tuesday focuses on separate statements that Mr. Trump made in June 2019 after Ms. Carroll revealed her allegations in New York magazine, but the judge has ruled that Ms. Carroll does not need to prove abuse and defamation a second time, given the jury’s decision last May.

Mr. Trump, who was still in office in 2019, called Ms. Carroll’s rape claim “totally false,” saying that he had never met Ms. Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, and that she had invented the story to sell a book. The current case — filed before the suit that has already been heard — had been held up by appeals.

Shawn G. Crowley, one of Ms. Carroll’s lawyers, told the jury in an opening statement that “speaking from the White House, Donald Trump used the most famous platform on earth to lie about what he had done, to attack Ms. Carroll’s hard-earned integrity and to falsely accuse her of inventing a terrible lie.”

Ms. Crowley said Mr. Trump had persisted in his attacks even as his supporters deluged Ms. Carroll with cruel insults about her looks and threats to her life. He continued to brand her a liar even after last year’s trial in which he was found liable for abusing her, all the way through this week. Ms. Crowley noted that over the course of Tuesday, he posted more lies about Ms. Carroll — by last count 22 social media posts, she said.

“Twenty-five years after sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll, Donald Trump defamed her for speaking up and then he did it again and again,” Ms. Crowley said. “He keeps doing it, even now. It’s time to make him stop.”

Ms. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million for damage to her reputation, in addition to unspecified punitive damages intended to punish Mr. Trump and deter further attacks.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, told the jury in her statement that the trial was not about assault or even Mr. Trump’s statements as he “defended himself.”

She turned the focus to Ms. Carroll, saying the case was “about a plaintiff who used her story to obtain as much fame and notoriety as possible,” and who now blames Mr. Trump for the backlash she received.

“She has been thrust back into the limelight like she always has wanted,” Ms. Habba said. She displayed pictures to the jury that showed Ms. Carroll beaming before photographers and cameras. “She doesn’t want to fix her reputation, ladies and gentlemen. She likes her new brand.”

Mr. Trump, who is on a quest for the Republican presidential nomination, has attacked Ms. Carroll regularly and relentlessly. He has said for weeks that he wanted to attend Ms. Carroll’s trial and to testify. On Tuesday, he sat through jury selection, but left in the afternoon two hours before a campaign rally in New Hampshire, which holds its presidential primary next week.

Mr. Trump is not obligated to be in the courtroom, but he has been trying to make a political virtue of his legal travails, which also include four criminal indictments. In the Republican primary, that approach has worked for him, with the indictments propelling his fund-raising and consolidating his support among a party base that sees him as being unfairly persecuted.

“I want to go to all of my trials,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week when he attended closing arguments in a New York civil fraud case.

During jury selection Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump seemed focused and attentive, whispering to his lawyers and pivoting in his seat to look at potential jurors as they responded to the judge’s questions. When Judge Lewis A. Kaplan asked whether any believed that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, two jurors said yes; and Mr. Trump let his gaze fall on them for several moments.

Politics seeped into the courtroom as the judge asked whether potential jurors had voted in recent presidential elections and whether they were registered to vote. Had they attended Mr. Trump’s rallies? Had they contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joseph R. Biden Jr.? Or of Mr. Trump?

Jurors were asked if they belonged to fringe groups like QAnon, Antifa, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. None answered yes.

When Judge Kaplan asked if anyone thought that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the court system, at least a couple of jurors said yes and for an instant, Mr. Trump half-raised his hand, seemingly more a reflex than an act of defiance.

Judge Kaplan told the prospective jurors that if selected, they would remain anonymous during the trial and he recommended that they not even use their real names when conversing with each other. “This is for your own protection,” he said. “This case has attracted media attention in the past and that’s likely to continue.”

He said the jurors would be taken to and from the court’s underground garage to drop-off locations in the city. The reason, he said, was “to protect all of you from any unwanted attention, harassment and invasion of your privacy.”

The question jurors will consider this week is purely financial. The judge previously ruled that Ms. Carroll did not need to prove again that Mr. Trump had sexually abused her in the mid-1990s or that his comments in 2019 were defamatory, finding they were substantially the same as the statements that prompted last year’s award.

The judge has said that Mr. Trump may not dispute in court Ms. Carroll’s version of the events that occurred at Bergdorf’s — as he frequently does in posts on his Truth Social website, on the campaign trail and recently, in a news conference in Manhattan.

Ms. Carroll testified in the trial last spring that the attack at Bergdorf’s came after she bumped into Mr. Trump one evening and he asked her to help him buy a present for a female friend.

They ended up in the department store’s lingerie section, where he motioned her to a dressing room, shut the door and began assaulting her. Using his weight to pin her, he pulled down her tights and forced his fingers and then, she said, his penis into her vagina.

Judge Kaplan has ruled that even though the jury did not find that Mr. Trump used his penis to assault her, Ms. Carroll’s rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”

But despite the judge’s rulings, Mr. Trump’s attacks continued even as jurors were chosen Tuesday to decide further punishment. Among his 22 posts was an image of Ms. Carroll on CNN, with the caption, “Can you believe I have to defend myself against this woman’s fake story?!”

Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.