Hefty, raucous, acrimonious
Law boffins say Trump’s showy rudeness in court probably influenced the jury to give him a sharp shock.
A federal jury saddled former President Donald Trump with a hefty $83.3 million decision in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against him on Friday, closing the curtain on a raucous week-and-a-half of acrimonious legal proceedings.
The jury deliberated for under three hours before delivering their verdict, which included $18.8 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages for Carroll.
The significant sum comes after Trump displayed a brazen lack of legal decorum throughout the duration of the trial, repeatedly railing against Carroll online and going head-to-head with US District Judge Lewis Kaplan during his much-anticipated but ultimately brief testimony.
Dialing the rudeness up to a million has worked for him in way too many ways, but not in this one. It failed to persuade the jury to minimize the payout.
Trump and his legal team’s behavior made what was already a difficult defense nearly impossible for the former president, John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider.
That’s former federal judge John Jones who ruled in the Kitzmiller v Dover case back in 2005. He’s a star.
“When lawyers and litigants run roughshod over a judge or disregard his admonitions, juries don’t like that,” said Jones, who is now the president of Dickinson College.
Juries tend to grow attached to their presiding trial judge, Jones said, adding that they often come to see the judge as a protector of sorts. Thus, Trump and Habba’s apparent disregard for Kaplan during the trial likely didn’t go unnoticed by the jury.
And likely didn’t endear the vicious shouty toad to the jury.
Legal experts said the $83.3 million total in damages will be a significant hit to the former president’s finances — and Trump is almost certainly on the hook to pay all or most of it.
Let’s hope so.
That day that he got up and walked out ahead of the jury, instead of waiting respectfully for the jury to file out, was a breach of decorum that I have never seen before. And then he got up rudely and left during closing argument, because he couldn’t take the plaintiff’s attorneys pointing out that he thinks laws and court orders don’t apply to him; so he proved their point by throwing a temper tantrum and storming out.
As Lithwick noted, Trump was not defending against litigation, but continuing his effort to discredit democratic law, and to anoint himself as above the law. This or that monetary judgement amounts to little in the face of his delaying tactics and vast potential liability for multitudes of crimes. But every time he defies a judge without obtaining an immediate 10-30 day incarceration for contempt, he promotes his royal invulnerability, and normalizes the absence of the civility and trust that are crucial to underlie a functioning democracy.
Truth. I’m so sick of it.