FACT CHECK: No, Trump Was NOT Found Guilty of Rape

CLAIM: “Donald Trump has been found guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll.” This claim is false. 

WARNING: The following article contains graphic details of an allegation that may upset some readers.

• No physical evidence was provided to support the defendant’s claims – merely her words against Trump’s.
• The trial was heard in a civil, not criminal court room.
• The MeToo movement has heavily influenced the general public to believe all accusations, overwhelmingly based on emotions rather than solid facts.
• Donald Trump, being a high profile, ‘marmite’ character, would have found it difficult to experience a ‘fair trial’, with jurors highly likely to hold biased views, one way or the other, towards the former president.

Magazine writer E. Jean Carroll was excruciatingly vivid, on the witness stand, in describing what she alleges former President Donald Trump did to her with his hands.

“It was a horrible feeling because he curved, he put his hand inside of me and curved his finger,” she told the Manhattan federal jury on April 25, the first day of trial.

That jury on Tuesday awarded her $5 million in damages, after finding Trump civilly liable for sexual battery, but not for rape.

This, however, didn’t prevent anti-Republicans and Trump critics from taking to Twitter and other social media platforms to falsely accuse Trump of being found guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll.

“As I’m sitting here today, I can still feel it,” Carroll told the jury, about allegedly being digitally penetrated.

Those details from Carroll herself are among the statements that convinced a six-man, three-woman civil jury that Trump, 76, ‘more likely than not’ committed a sex offense against her — “battery” in legal parlance. It was a conclusion reached after less than three hours of deliberations.

But when Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, asked the writer what Trump did to her next, her description was far less vivid.

Despite the emotion behind it, Carroll’s answer could have been a quote from a lawsuit or criminal complaint.

“Then he inserted his penis,” Carroll testified.

When Kaplan next asked, “What did you do in that moment?” Carroll lost her composure briefly, the first of three times she cried in her three days of testimony.

The question remained unanswered.

The jury quickly agreed Trump was liable of sexual abuse, but not rape.

Despite their agreement on their belief that Carroll was telling the truth about sexual abuse, the jury could not reach that same level of certainty on the question of whether Trump also raped Carroll during that same mid-1990s alleged attack.

On cross examination, Trump defense attorney Joe Tacopina pointed out that Carroll was less than clear in her 2019 memoir, “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” the book in which she accused Trump of rape and has made her a small fortune.

“In your book you wrote that he was ‘forcing his fingers around my private area and then thrust his penis halfway completely, I’m not certain, inside me.’ Is that accurate?” he asked Carroll.

“Yes,” she answered.

Tacopina — who won an acquittal the last time he faced a rape accuser in court — also cast doubt on the mechanics of the battle Carroll described — their “colossal” dressing room struggle, as Tacopino called it nearly a dozen times, always sarcastically.

“We were basically the same height,” Carroll told Tacopina during cross examination.

“Because I was wearing four-inch heels and I was 5′ 9″ at the time, so 6′ 1′,” she testified.

“So you are saying,” Tacopina asked, “that you got your knee up to his — it would be waist, as high as his waist?”

She answered, “No, below his waist.”

“Four-inch heels,” Tacopina repeated, sounding skeptical, as the cross-examination continued.

“It’s your story that you did this while balancing on four-inch heels, you said?”

“I can dance backwards and forwards in four-inch heels,” she snapped back. “I can raise one leg in heels.”

Tacopina revisited the “colossal” battle in his summations.

“Her tights didn’t rip after this colossal struggle?” he asked jurors. “And the physical act itself is impossible,” he added.

He went on to conjure up an image of what he painted as an unlikely scene.

“Ms. Carroll described here what she described, that Donald Trump, with his shoulder pushed against her chest, while her knees — her tights are pulled down above her knees while she is stomping him with four inch heels, hitting him,” he said. “He must have managed somehow with that other hand to open his pants and during the struggle, somehow engaged in a sexual act with her while she is standing up, stamping her feet, with her legs being pulled together by tights above her knee?”

The jury, who remained anonymous, left the federal courthouse without commenting. Unless any of them speaks out, it can’t be known what persuaded them to find, so quickly, that Trump is liable for battery but not rape.

It must be noted that many people have been falsely accused of rape, often for financial or political motivations held by the accuser.

A recent example of this can be found in the case of Virginia Giuffre, who falsely accused a string of celebrities, politicians and socialites of rape, including alleging that renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz had raped her on multiple occasions.

Giuffre, who also admitted that, despite alleging in her memoir that Prince Andrew had raped her in New Mexico, she had never met the prince in New Mexico, later admitted that she ‘may have made a mistake’ in accusing Alan Dershowitz, and has since dropped her lawsuit against him.