Last week Donald Trump was ordered to pay an eight-figure award for defaming author and journalist E. Jean Carroll years after he’d sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Trump probably expected that the unpleasant shock of that judgment would disappear—as so many things apparently do—into the forgotten recesses of his mind. However, it appears that Carroll intends to use the award to keep the verdict fresh in the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s memory by highlighting and helping to compensate other women Trump has allegedly victimized over the past several decades.
Interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Carroll suggested she intended to draw upon the $83 million award to create “something Donald Trump hates.”
RELATED STORY: Keep talking about E. Jean Carroll's $83 million award against Trump
As reported by GMA’s Peter Charalambous:
"If it'll cause him pain for me to give money to certain things, that's my intent," Carroll told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America," suggesting she would create a "fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump."
Watch:
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan also expressed confidence that her client would, in fact, collect on the judgment. As Charalambous reports:
"I'm pretty confident one way or the other. We might not get it right away. But one way or the other, he owns a lot of real estate. It can be sold. We will collect the judgment," Kaplan said.
As of May 2023, 26 women have publicly accused Donald Trump of some type of sexual misconduct. Their allegations, occurring over several decades, run the gamut from crude, boorish harassment to full-blown sexual assaults by Trump. As reported at that time by Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun for Business Insider, Trump has dismissed all of those allegations as false and “politically motivated.”
But the verdict obtained by Carroll may now signal even broader ramifications. As noted by Media Matters, prominent conservatives have expressed fears that the $83 million award may portend a “make it or break it time for the United States of America.” Speaking on Steve Bannon’s Jan. 26 Real America’s Voice News “The War Room” broadcast, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, suggested that the jury award was evidence of a conspiracy to weaponize government against Trump and conservatives by draining their resources.
As Schlapp noted:
Donald Trump has all of us in his hands, on his shoulders, all around him, he's standing up for all of us when he takes these slings and arrows and if they're able to keep him out of that White House, I know he's going to win but if they're able to somehow keep him out of that White House, they're going to change this country in a way that you've never seen.
This $83 million -- this is just the beginning. All of us will be paraded down this gangplank. We won't have our resources, we won't have our homes, we won't have our livelihood.
Schlapp himself is no stranger to sexual misconduct allegations. As reported by the The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard and Isaac Arnsdorf, CPAC’s parent organization, the American Conservative Union, is currently being sued for not investigating claims made against Schlapp himself. As Reinhard and Arnsdorf reported in December:
Officials overseeing the Conservative Political Action Conference knew about past accusations of sexual misconduct by chairman Matt Schlapp but failed to investigate or remove him from his powerful post, an amended sexual battery and defamation lawsuit claims.
In one alleged incident, during a fundraising trip to South Florida in early 2022, Schlapp was accused of stripping to his underwear and rubbing against another person without his consent, according to the filing. In 2017, at a CPAC after-party, Schlapp attempted to kiss an employee against his wishes, the lawsuit claims.
It’s not clear—and Schlapp does not address—whether these allegedly nefarious attacks on conservatives might be mitigated if conservatives simply … refrained from sexually assaulting people and publicly defaming them afterward. But assuming Carroll’s brave effort sets an example for others subjected to unwanted harassment, his concerns may prove to be well-founded.
RELATED STORY: Jury orders Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83M for calling her a liar
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