Writer E. Jean Carroll's second trial against Donald Trump kicked off on Tuesday morning, with her lawyers imploring jurors to hit the former president with financial damages for continuing to defame her, per Business Insider.
Trump, who was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million after being found liable of sexually abusing and defaming her in May, has continued to deny the longtime columnist's allegations that he assaulted her in a department store dressing room in New York in the 1990s. "Can you believe I have to defend myself against this woman's fake story?!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. The ex-president also doubled down on previous assertions that the case is a "hoax" and a "witch-hunt," language he has used to describe some of his indictments.
In his opening statement on Tuesday, Carroll's attorney Shawn Crowley asked jurors to hit Trump with monetary fines for persistently speaking ill of Carroll.
"How much money will it take to make him stop?" she told jurors. "Because he hasn't stopped. Ms. Carroll had taken on the most powerful man on Earth, and she won. And even that didn't stop him."
Business Insider reported that by the time Crowley delivered her opening statement, Trump's Truth Social account had posted about Carroll 22 times.
"It's time to make him pay dearly for what he's done," Crowley said. "Make him pay enough to finally stop him."
Crowley observed how Trump, while sitting in the Manhattan courtroom, "posted more defamatory statements. More lies about Ms. Carroll... Think about that when you consider how much money it will take to get him to stop."
NYU law professor and MSNBC contributor Andrew Weissmann argued that Trump's proclivity to fire off posts about Carroll may not bode well for him legally, alluding to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani being ordered to shell out nearly $150 million to election workers in Georgia. "Trump's social media posts may play outside the courtroom," Weissmann tweeted, "but inside they may be as deadly to him as Rudy's comments were to him in the Freeman/Moss defamation case."
MAGA attorney Alina Habba responded by alleging the ex-president's posts about Carroll were in fact a boon for her career. "Her career has prospered, and she has been thrust back into the limelight, as she always wanted," Habba said. "She went on talk shows. She did interviews. She has gained more fame, more notoriety." Habba added that Carroll now wants to collect more money from Trump because "some people online said something mean to her." The writer "doesn't need to repair her reputation," Habba continued. "She likes her new brand" as an "anti-Trump figure."
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