Donald Trump stormed out of a courtroom on Friday as closing arguments began in a damages trial in New York.
A jury found Trump liable last year for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll in a New York department store in the 1990s and defaming her after she wrote about the incident.
The current trial focuses only on what damages Trump will have to pay for defaming Ms Carroll, 80.
Trump left as Ms Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan told jurors they should punish the former US president for persistently
lying about her client and destroying her reputation as a responsible journalist.
“We all have to follow the law,” Ms Kaplan said. “Donald Trump, however, acts as if these rules and laws just don’t apply to him.”
District Judge Lewis Kaplan, not related to Ms Carroll’s lawyer, said after Trump walked out: “The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”
Ms Carroll is seeking at least $10m in compensatory damages and an unspecified amount in punitive damages. The jury could reach a verdict as early as today.
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She is seeking the damages over Trump’s 2019 denials, when he was president, that he raped her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump, 77, accused Ms Carroll of making up the encounter to boost sales of her memoir.
But a ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in May 2023 over a similar denial he made in October 2022, finding that the former US leader had sexually abused her and later defamed her.
Because that verdict is binding for the current trial, this jury need decide only how much Trump owes Carroll for harming her reputation, and whether to impose punitive damages to keep him from defaming her again.
Trump has continued attacking Carroll during the trial, proclaiming that her case was a “witch hunt” and a “con job” and maintaining that he had not known her in the mid-1990s.
“This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all,” Roberta Kaplan said on Friday.
A lawyer for Trump will offer a closing argument later in the day
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