NEW YORK — Hours after trouncing his rivals in the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump wasn’t out fundraising or turning his attention to next week’s New Hampshire primary. Instead, he was back in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday morning, where for hours he sat silently, observing the selection of a jury that will determine how much money he should pay a rape accuser he defamed.
It was an unusual turn for someone who could have been taking a victory lap as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, but not for Trump, who is facing a demanding legal calendar that took him from a civil fraud trial that ended last week to the defamation trial that began Tuesday.
It is Trump’s second trial against the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won her first case against the former president last year when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing her in the 1990s and then defaming her in 2022. That jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.
The current trial concerns separate comments that Trump made about Carroll in 2019, while Trump was president. The jury’s job is to determine not whether Trump defamed Carroll in those comments — U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has already ruled that he did — but simply how much Trump should pay her in damages. (Any award would come on top of the $5 million awarded in the 2023 trial.)
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