The judge asked the jury if 'M' meant 'million' in Trump verdict: Carroll friend recalls
A longtime friend of E. Jean Carroll's sat in the gallery of the federal courtroom in Manhattan on Friday as a jury awarded a whopping $83.3 million judgment. She described it as "the most dramatic 15 minutes of my life."
Lisa Birnbach, who testified in the summer about a 1996 phone call with Carroll confiding in her about Donald Trump sexually abusing her inside of the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, was seated in the gallery with her daughter when the jury returned with the judgment. It was nearly ten times the amount they were seeking.
Carroll and her lawyers spoke to Rachel Maddow in the hour previously. Among the things Carroll revealed is that she thought Trump wasn't quite "there." He acted like a "walrus," she explained, snorting about the courtroom.
"We all started holding hands and squeezing," she told Lawrence O'Donnell during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word" Monday. "I've never seen anything like it. It was by far the most dramatic 15 minutes of my life."
She recalled not knowing that the judgment had come in. They were told only that there was a "note" from the jury. When Carroll and her lawyers entered, Birnbach said one mouthed the word "verdict."
It was the precise moment when U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan asked the jury foreman, one of two women deciding "The Donald's" financial fate, that Birnbach felt relief, knowing things were going to turn out well for Carroll.
"And until the foreperson handed her envelope to the clerk, who opened it up — she had trouble reading something, handed it to Judge Kaplan," recalled Birnbach. "And now, I'm imagining all kinds of bad things and Judge Kaplan asked her 'Is that an 'M' and what does it stand for?'
"And she said, 'Yes. Million.'"
O'Donnell was stunned.
"Oh, that's before — Oooh. Wow," he said.
"Yeah, that's before everything else was read," Birnbach added. "So, that was a very good indication that I could let go of my daughter, my friends hands, and perhaps live another moment."
"Wow, I've never — in a civil verdict trial, I've never heard that tip that way," he told her. "It's always the number comes out, and then more numbers come out, as was here, about three or four numbers come out, because there are three or four different things the returning money for. And so we are sitting through every one of those. And every one of them is coming with the word 'million,' and they're getting bigger."
She believes that the jury in this case took careful thought to come up with the substantial amount they believe Trump owes Carroll.
"And this jury obviously took it so seriously because the numbers they came up with were not numbers that have been discussed; they were obviously something they had thought about," she said.
Carroll's lawyer, Shawn Crowley, told Maddow that the high sum seems to have worked so far if Trump's silence on the matter is any indication.