Trump glowers and gestures in court, then leaves to campaign as sex abuse defamation trial opens

Donald Trump shook his head in disgust Tuesday as the judge in his New York defamation trial told would-be jurors that an earlier jury had already decided the former president sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.

Trump left court before opening statements, jetting to a New Hampshire political rally as Carroll’s lawyer accused the Republican presidential frontrunner of using “the world’s biggest microphone” to destroy her reputation and turn his supporters against her. Trump’s lawyer contended that Carroll has never been more famous and that she is blaming him for “a few mean tweets from Twitter trolls.”

Fresh from a political win Monday in the Iowa caucuses, Trump detoured to a Manhattan courtroom for the start of what amounts to the penalty phase of Carroll’s civil lawsuit alleging he attacked her at a department store in 1996. Trump departed Tuesday after the nine-member jury was selected.

He glared and scowled at times as the jury was being picked, slyly raising his hand at one point when Judge Lewis A. Kaplan asked if anyone felt Trump had been treated unfairly by the court system. The gesture drew laughs from some people in the courtroom and a retort from the judge, who said: “We know where you stand.”.

After Trump left, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley implored jurors to make him pay — potentially millions of dollars — for comments he made while president in response to her claims in a 2019 memoir that he sexually abused her years earlier at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman store.

Trump “used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll,” Crowley said in her opening statement. His comments, including claims that Carroll was lying to sell books, humiliated the writer and tore “her reputation to shreds,” the lawyer said.

While the trial concerns what Trump must pay for his comments in the immediate aftermath of Carroll’s revelations, Crowley noted that his rhetoric about the writer hasn’t stopped. Trump maintains he never abused Carroll and that her allegations are a partisan smear.

Crowley told jurors their job was to answer the question about Trump: “How much money will it take to get him to stop?”