I'll admit it: I was floored by how quickly the jury in the E. Jean Carroll trial came back — and with a $5 million verdict, no less. It's not because I had any doubts about the strength of the evidence for Carroll's claim that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her, likely in the spring of 1996. As anyone following the case closely could tell you, Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, rolled out about as airtight a case as could be expected. She also had the benefit of Trump as a defendant. He not only is on tape bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy," during his taped deposition for this case, he radiated contempt for laws against sexual assault. He even used the word "fortunately" to describe "a million years" of carte blanche the privileged have to commit acts of sexual violence. It's unsurprising his lawyer elected not to have Trump testify, not that Trump would ever have the courage to do it. Trump's obvious pride in being a sexual predator may have led to a blurted confession on the stand.
No, my anxiety was built around a single question: Would some MAGA juror tank the case?
As I noted in Tuesday's Standing Room Only newsletter, that's the unspoken question haunting every legal case and investigation against Trump. The former president was just indicted in Manhattan for campaign finance fraud and hush money payments. He faces another possible indictment in Georgia over his efforts to steal the 2020 election. The investigation into stolen classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago continues. And, of course, there is the granddaddy of them all, the federal investigation run by special prosecutor Jack Smith into Trump's role in inciting the January 6 insurrection.
Turn on cable news on any night and you'll hear a chorus of legal talking heads explain that these legal cases have to be "rigorous" and "deliberate," because the privileged position of a former president makes the evidentiary bar super high. If you are watching with me, you will hear me making "pffft" noises in response. That Trump is guilty of more crimes than we can imagine is no longer actually a question in the minds of reasonable people, just based on the public evidence alone. The real concern that all this talk of presidents and privilege is pointing at is the very serious threat that Republicans on juries will simply refuse to convict because they would rather break the law than admit a liberal was right about Trump.
Getting a judgment against anyone is hard in these cases, which tells you a lot about how slam dunk this case was against Trump.
Well, we've had our first test case of a jury hearing about Trump's crimes. The result is heartening. The jury spent less than three hours deliberating, which is about as fast a decision as I've ever heard in a case such as this. Yes, they only found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, taking a pass on the charge of rape. But it's really not the jury's fault that the law still has antiquated notions that treat forced penetration by penis and fingers as categorically different. What matters here is simple: The jury did not feel hamstrung by politics to deny the obvious truth in what Carroll was saying about her experience with Trump.
As ugly as rape cases can get, there's a silver lining in the fact that this was, in fact, a case centered around gendered violence. As any expert in violence against women can tell you, obtaining any kind of justice for sexual violence is nearly impossible, not because of lack of proof, but because of plain old sexism. Any random jury of 9 or 12 people is highly likely to have a person or two — if not more — who still subscribes to a myriad of rape myths that pin the blame on the victim for not being "pure" or "innocent" enough. Subsequently, perpetrators see jail time in only 2.5% of sexual assault cases. Getting a judgment against anyone is hard in these cases, which tells you a lot about how slam dunk this case was against Trump.
It does feel a little safer going forward with faith that juries can handle the immense responsibility of trying a past president with an open mind and respect for facts.
If a juror had wanted to let Trump off the hook, Trump's lawyer, Joe Tacopino, offered a grab bag of rape myths they could use to justify pretending not to believe Carroll: That she was only in it for the money. That she had it coming for flirting with Trump and/or for teasing him in an emasculating way. That being sexually assaulted is not as bad as women make it out to be, which Tacopino drew out by harping on how Carroll continued to live her life after the assault. (Never mind that, by her own reckoning, she never had sex again.) There's significant overlap between believing these rape myths and voting for Trump, so it's not a reach to see something like this happening on the jury.
Instead, Carroll got a fair trial and a just and unanimous verdict. The jury listened to the evidence and came right back with what was the only correct conclusion: Carroll told the truth and Trump lied. Justice is possible. Not that MAGA saboteurs aren't a future possibility, but it does feel a little safer going forward with faith that juries can handle the immense responsibility of trying a past president with an open mind and respect for facts.
It's sad that this feels like such a momentous victory, but it is. We live in an era of sustained abuse of the very concept of truth, much of it led by Trump himself. To this day, nearly two-thirds of Republican voters espouse the Big Lie. Most don't really believe it, I suspect, so much as they feel the need to say they do, out of partisan loyalty. But, in courtroom after courtroom, we're seeing a hard limit on the power of such disinformation efforts. The Proud Boys were convicted. So were the Oath Keepers. Alex Jones keeps losing in court. Fox News had to pay $787.5 million in a settlement to avoid what they knew would be shellacking by a jury in their Big Lie case.
Granted, the odds were in reality's favor, in a city where President Joe Biden got 87% of the vote. Still, this resounding judgment serves as a reminder that not all hope is lost. Plus, most of the other locales Trump could be tried in just happen to be big blue cities. This was a swift and resolute victory for the truth. It should raise hopes that other such victories are possible.
