Trump columnist lawsuit

In this courtroom sketch, prospective jurors file into the courtroom on Tuesday in New York as Donald Trump, third left, stands surrounded by his defense team. Alina Habba, fourth left, Trump's lead defense attorney, stands beside him. E. Jean Carroll, background second from right, stands with her attorney Roberta Kaplan.

Elizabeth Williams/AP photo
NEW YORK — 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 front-runner 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.”
Trump, the former president, and Carroll, the former longtime Elle Magazine columnist, sat at separate tables about a dozen feet (3.7 meters) apart, flanked by their respective legal teams. They didn’t appear to speak or make eye contact.
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.
“He said this from the White House, a place where presidents have signed laws, declared wars and decided the fate of the nation," Crowley told jurors.
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 says her allegations are a partisan smear.
From court Tuesday, 
  • Trump fired off a series of social media posts about the case. He wrote on his Truth Social platform that Carroll’s rape allegation was an “attempted EXTORTION” involving “fabricated lies and political shenanigans," and he accused the judge of having “absolute hatred” for him.
Crowley told jurors their job was to answer the question about Trump: “How much money will it take to make him to stop?"
  • However, Trump attorney Alina Habba said he was “merely defending himself” and said evidence will show that Carroll’s career has prospered since accusing him. Carroll has been “thrust back into the limelight like she always has wanted,” Habba said in her opening argument.
  • Responding to Crowley's assertion that Trump backers have sent Carroll violent threats, Habba said she sympathized with victims of sexual abuse but any backlash Carroll suffered was “simply a byproduct of the digital age."
“Regardless of a few mean tweets, Ms. Carroll is now more famous than she has ever been in her life, and loved and respected by many, which was her goal," Habba told jurors.

Testimony will begin Wednesday, when Carroll is expected to take the witness stand. . .