On Friday, a jury unanimously ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll. Judge Lewis Kaplan warned the jury members to stay anonymous, telling them they would likely face harassment and threats of violence from Trump supporters if their identities were discovered.
Judge’s orders
“My advice to you,” Kaplan told the jurors, “is that you never disclose that you were on this jury.” He had previously ordered that the jurors should remain anonymous while they debated the size of Trump’s payment.
Rationale
Kaplan went as far as to suggest that each member not reveal their actual names to their fellow jurors. According to the New York Times, Kaplan explained the need for such secrecy in a pretrial ruling, writing that jurors were at risk of “harassment or worse by Mr. Trump’s supporters — or the former president himself.”
Limited knowledge
Typically, lawyers from both sides of a case can scrutinize jurors for any potential bias. However, in this case, they only had access to a set of answers each juror gave to Judge Kaplan’s questions.
Removing extremes
Potential jurors who indicated a high degree of political involvement were not selected, including a “Pod Save America” listener and a man who attended a Trump rally. Most jurors said that they had voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections but were not required to specify their vote.
Some details
The nine jurors who ended up handing down Trump’s $83 million verdict included seven men and two women. Most of them were between 26 and 60 years of age, and a majority said they lived in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Westchester County.
Disbelief
On Sunday, ex-federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann called Judge Kaplan’s courtroom warning to the jurors “remarkable.” “The last time I was in a courtroom where a judge said that to a jury,” he said on MSNBC, “Vincent Gigante, the former boss of the Genovese family, had been convicted.”
Clarifying statement
“While you are legally free,” Weissmann explained, the judge in the Gigante case strongly advised jurors “not to speak individually to the press out of concern of retribution from Gigante and his ilk.”
Unprecedented behavior
“It is remarkable,” Weissmann said, “that that same admonition was said with respect to somebody who was the president of the United States.”
Not the first time
Trump was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll in 2023. In the same trial, he was also found liable for defamation and ordered to pay the writer $5 million. Separate defamatory comments formed the basis of the second, more recent trial.
Interesting theory
According to David Cay Johnston, author of a 2016 biography about Trump, the former president is “doubling, tripling, quintupling down” on attacking Carroll in order to gain sympathy from his supporters. “I think his goal here is to get an enormous award from this jury so that he can use it to stir up his base.”
Hidden codes
Trump will complain that “it’s a New York jury, which of course is code for they’re not Christian, and they’re not white,” Johnston said. “That will appeal to his base, but it won’t broaden his support.”
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