U.S. District Judge Lewis A. 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 in Iowa on Saturday as the Republican frontrunning 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.
The state law specifically defines rape as penis-in-vagina. Since he only (ugh, I hate using that word here, because it makes it sound like I’m minimizing the attack…) fingered her, it wasn’t technically rape by the state’s very narrow definition. But that judge also said that his PR team couldn’t start going around with the “lol the courts said he didn’t rape her” thing, because the judge accepted that the extremely narrow legal definition and common nomenclature are different. When a regular person thinks “not rape” that usually includes things like fingering.
Trump’s argument feels a lot like the “pedophiles and hebephiles are different, so I’m not technically a pedophile even though I’m attracted to 11 year olds” thing that sometimes gets argued by creeps.