'He didn't smell good': E. Jean Carroll pinpoints exact moment Trump lost defamation case
E. Jean Carroll pinpointed the precise moment that Donald Trump lost in her massive defamation lawsuit and vividly described his bizarre behavior during the trial.
A jury awarded the 81-year-old journalist $83.3 million after she accused the once and future president of defaming her by calling her a liar for alleging that he had sexually assaulted her decades ago, and she told the Daily Beast Podcast that jurors could not take their eyes off the spectacle he made of himself in the New York courtroom.
“I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat, elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in 'The Birds,' and sits in a courtroom and moans and groans and complains and snorts,” Carroll told host Joanna Coles.
Trump left the campaign trail to sit glowering and fidgeting in the courtroom, and Carroll said his countenance was unforgettably unpleasant.
“They were mesmerized, you have never seen anything like it,” Carroll said. “He never sat still, and he talked the entire time within earshot of the jury. He belittled Alina Habba, his own attorney. He would spit as he was talking. He didn’t smell so good.”
The key moment in the trial, Carroll told the podcast, came when Trump stormed out of the courtroom while her attorney, Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, delivered the closing argument.
“He stood up with steam coming off his back and hot air blowing out his ears because Robbie Kaplan was giving the final argument, and she was asking the jury how much it would take to make him stop,” Carroll recalled.
“She drove him so crazy, he stood up in the courtroom and left,” Carroll added. “When a man is innocent, he doesn’t storm out of a courtroom; he stays and fights. He turned tail and stormed out of the courtroom. He lost right at that second. He couldn’t have looked more guilty.”
Carroll, a longtime magazine columnist, publicly accused Trump in 2019 of raping her in a lingerie dressing room in a New York City department store in the 1990s, and Trump, then serving his first term as president, denied her allegations, called her a liar and declared "she’s not my type."
A jury in a 2023 civil trial found Trump liable for sexual abuse and awarded her $5 million, and Carroll described the out-of-body sensation she felt when the jury forewoman handed over what Kaplan called the "big kahuna verdict" in the second trial.
“The clerk opens it up, reads it, frowns, shakes his head, folds it back up, and then hands it to Judge [Lewis] Kaplan,” Carroll said, “and Judge Kaplan opens it up, and his eyebrows rise up towards his hairline, and he frowns, and he says, ‘Madame forewoman, what does the M stand for?’”
That letter stood for "million," the forewoman told the judge.
“That was a moment,” Carroll said. “I left my body. As I say, I felt like Peter Pan who flies around the ceilings, and quite frankly, I’ve never come down from that. That win was so enormous and so powerful, not for me, not for Robbie, but for everybody in the country who had sort of lost hope that he could ever be beaten.”
A federal appellate court just last month denied his bid to overturn the massive verdict, and Carroll said she feels vindicated.
“We’re still feeling the good victory of that," she said. "It’s happened, and we’ve proved — Robbie proved, and I proved — that Trump can be beaten. He can be beaten.”