'She smiled': Expert explains how 'emboldened' E. Jean Carroll stared Trump down in court

When the moment finally came to confront former President Donald Trump, writer E. Jean Carroll was "emboldened" to stare him down, wrote legal expert Lisa Rubin for MSNBC's MaddowBlog Tuesday.

Carroll has accused former President Donald Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Trump denied the allegations and said she was lying to sell books — which led to Carroll suing him for defamation. A prior jury found Trump liable for $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation, and this month, another jury awarded Carroll another $83.3 million in damages.

At the beginning of the trial, wrote Rubin, "I saw what trauma looks like in a seated position." Carroll was petrified, and fearful of confronting the man who was found by a jury to have terrorized her.

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However, she continued, "by the trial’s last day, as one of her lawyers, Roberta Kaplan, delivered her closing argument, a different Carroll revealed herself. No longer fixing her gaze directly ahead, hands gripping the armrests, she swiveled around in her chair to enjoy Kaplan on the podium, a view that included Trump himself, until he unceremoniously walked out. And instead of looking down or away, she smiled, she was animated, she was emboldened. Once the hunted, she was now the fox."

In an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow after the fact, Carroll remarked that she saw Trump as "nothing" in that moment.

To focus on whether, and how soon, Carroll can collect her money, is to miss the big picture, concluded Rubin. "That misunderstands what Carroll has been fighting for since 2019 and seems to have now secured: a freedom from fear of Trump — the freedom, at 80, to excavate and revive her witty, 'ebullient' self, as her former boss Robbie Myers described the E. Jean she knew ... She encased herself in armor, only to find her assaulter reduced to a naked emperor."