M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
Trump's accuser hit him where it hurts — his bottom line.
Roberta Kaplan, attorney for E. Jean Carroll, believes money may talk, but it also silences.
"All he really understands is money and so you should award an amount of money that should make him stop," she said.
Carroll, 80, won an $83.3 million jury verdict, proving in court that she suffered ridiculing in public again and again by former President Donald Trump, 77, years after coming forward to attest to being sexually assaulted inside of a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room back in the 1990s.
There is still a pause for Kaplan on whether the hit to his pocketbook will work as a kind of money muzzle. But she specifically didn't rule out future litigation against Trump.
Trump notably nixed Carroll's name when he responded to the steep sum imposed by the jury inside of the Manhattan federal courtroom on Friday.
"Absolutely ridiculous," he wrote in a post on Truth Social, vowing to contest it. "I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party."
Kaplan believes Trump did himself zero favors when he and his entourage stood up and stormed out of the courtroom while she was offering her closing arguments.
Kaplan was in the process of telling the jury that the 45th president had the gall to call Carroll's sexual abuse allegations against him a "con job."
"I think it hurt him terribly," she said. "Our whole case is about the fact Donald Trump is unable to follow the law, unable to follow the rules. He thinks they don't apply to him."
And she said Trump's cruelest thing Trump did to Carroll beyond the physical attack, was his effort to repeatedly cut her down in public as being a "liar" and a "whack job."
"And as bad as what he did to E. Jean Carroll was and the sexual assault was terrible and as horrifying as the defamation was back in 2019 — the most amazing shocking part of it all is he kept on doing it, and he kept on doing it even during the trial."
She added: "What other person thinks they can openly break the law over and over again? Donald Trump."
