Trump tactic disallowed for Carroll trial

NEW YORK — A judge late Saturday said former President Donald Trump’s lawyers can’t present legal arguments to a jury assessing damages at a defamation trial on a jury’s conclusion last year that he didn’t rape a columnist in the mid-1990s.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan made the determination in an order in advance of a Jan. 16 trial to determine defamation damages against Trump after a jury concluded Trump sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll but did not find evidence was sufficient to conclude that he raped her.

Trump, speaking Saturday in Iowa as the Republican front-running presidential candidate in advance of a Jan. 15 primary, criticized the judge as a “radical Democrat” and mocked E. Jean Carroll for not screaming when she was attacked.

“It was all made up,” he said.

Carroll, 80, won a $5 million award last May from a jury that concluded Trump sexually abused her in 1996 in a luxury department store dressing room and defamed her in 2022.

In this month’s trial, a jury will consider whether damages should be levied against Trump for remarks he made after last year’s verdict and in 2019 while he was president after Carroll spoke publicly for the first time about her mid-1990s claims in a memoir.

Carroll’s lawyers had asked the judge to issue the order, saying that Trump’s attorneys should not be allowed to confuse jurors this month about last year’s verdict by trying to argue that the jury disbelieved Carroll’s rape claim.

A lawyer for Trump did not immediately return a message Saturday.