Judge to Trump: It’s Still “Substantially True” That You Raped E. Jean Carroll

A judge on Monday dismissed Donald Trump’s defamation countersuit against E. Jean Carroll because her allegations that the former president raped her are “substantially true.”

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her about $5 million in damages. A few days later, Carroll gave an interview on CNN during which she said, “Oh yes he did, oh yes he did” when asked about the jury’s finding that Trump had not raped her.

Almost two months after that, Trump sued Carroll for her comments. His counterclaim alleged that she had defamed him by saying he raped her when the jury had found he only sexually abused her (which is so much better).

“Ms. Carroll’s statements were substantially true,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his ruling Monday dismissing Trump’s countersuit. “Unlike the jury’s finding on the Penal Law ‘rape’ question, its finding on the sexual abuse question—and specifically its implicit determination that Mr. Trump digitally raped her—is conclusive with respect to this case.”

Kaplan has made clear he will suffer no foolishness from Trump. In mid-July, he rejected Trump’s demand for a new trial. Trump’s lawyers had argued in court documents that the awarded damages were “excessive” because the jury determined Carroll had not been raped and that his assault had not caused her any mental injury.

But Kaplan called Trump’s argument “entirely unpersuasive” and noted that the New York penal law definition of rape is “far narrower” than in common understanding. As a result, not only would Trump not get a new trial, but he is definitely a rapist.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan said in his ruling.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) lauded Monday’s ruling. “We are pleased that the Court dismissed Donald Trump’s counterclaim. That means that the January 15th jury trial will be limited to a narrow set of issues and shouldn’t take very long to complete,” she said in a statement, referring to Carroll’s second defamation lawsuit against Trump.

“E. Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages based on the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made in 2019.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall. She amended her second lawsuit, which is still pending, to include those comments.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to thwart Carroll’s lawsuits, but he has been denied at every turn. And he will go into the second trial, which is scheduled to start in January, having lost a major asset: The Justice Department no longer considers him immune.

Donald Trump—who apparently hates both America and women—went on a wild rant after the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team was knocked out of the World Cup, mocking the players and inexplicably blaming their loss on “wokeness.”

The top-ranked team lost Sunday to Sweden, the U.S. team’s earliest exit ever and a shocking disappointment. Trump has disliked the team, particularly its star player Megan Rapinoe, for years and lost no time in throwing salt on the wound.

“The ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our [sic] once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden. Many of our players were openly hostile to America,” he said Sunday night on Truth Social.

“No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot, Megan, the USA is going to HELL!!! MAGA.”

It should go without saying that (1) Joe Biden had nothing to do with the team’s loss, and (2) nothing will happen to the United States just because its team was knocked out of the Women’s World Cup.

The simple answer is that the team failed to perform to its usual standards throughout the entire tournament. The loss is particularly bitter for Rapinoe, who plans to retire at the end of the domestic season in November.

But Trump couldn’t pass up the opportunity to blame something on a queer woman. He and Rapinoe have traded barbs for years, starting in 2019 when Rapinoe said she considered herself a “walking protest against the Trump administration” and would not be “going to the fucking White House” if her team won the World Cup that year (they did). Trump has repeatedly mocked Rapinoe ever since.

Spectators drowned out Mitch McConnell’s attempts to give a speech over the weekend with boos and demands he retire, a week after the Senate minority leader froze during a press conference.

McConnell appeared at a church picnic in his home state of Kentucky on Saturday. But when he got up to give a speech, he got probably the exact opposite reaction he was expecting.

Picnic attendees booed him and chanted, “Retire!” They also called out, “Shame on you, “Ditch Mitch,” and “Lost the Senate!” McConnell futilely attempted to keep speaking, but the chants were far too loud for him to be heard.

The heckling comes about a week after McConnell froze during a news conference and appeared unable to continue speaking. He was escorted away from the cameras, and when he returned later, McConnell declined to comment on what happened or whether it was related to the fall he suffered in March, which resulted in a concussion and his weeks-long absence from the Senate.

In addition to his concussion, McConnell reportedly fell while at the airport just three weeks ago, and he has been using a wheelchair to get around crowded areas. His physical condition isn’t actually that surprising: At 81, he’s the longest-serving Senate party leader, and he’s a member of the second-oldest Senate in history.

His fellow Republicans are also starting to make noise about his stepping down. Another Republican senator told NBC anonymously last week that McConnell is “definitely slower with his gait” and that he declines to discuss his health in private. Another Republican senator, again speaking anonymously to NBC, said that McConnell doesn’t speak nearly as much during the weekly party meetings.

“I think that he is just not processing,” the senator said.

Even those who are brave enough to go on the record seem concerned about McConnell’s ability to remain in leadership.

“He suffered a really bad fall, and that’s actually had an impact on him,” Senator Ron Johnson said last week, without going into more detail about McConnell’s ability to keep working. “Obviously, that fall affected him.”

“Age affects us all,” Johnson said. “You can’t deny that reality.”

McConnell, however, has given no indication that he is leaving anytime soon.

Everyone knows that Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who will oversee Donald Trump’s trial on charges that he illegally kept classified documents, is in the tank for him. Cannon has already gone out of her way—and broken with long-standing precedent—to show her loyalty to the man who appointed her to the federal bench. But other aspects of her judicial record are now being scrutinized.

According to a Friday morning report from Reuters, Cannon has made a number of costly errors on the federal bench. This is not especially surprising given her overall lack of experience—she was appointed to her current position after only 12 years as an attorney. In a June trial, that lack of experience caused significant problems. While overseeing the trial of an Alabama man who had been accused of spreading images of child sex abuse online, Cannon closed jury selection to the public—a violation of the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial. In the same case, Cannon also forgot to swear in the jury pool, a mistake that forced the judge to restart the jury selection process. The case ended with the defendant pleading guilty before it could go to trial.

The errors, however, only underscore Cannon’s lack of experience. The earlier mistake, Stephen Smith, a professor at the Santa Clara School of Law told Reuters, was “a fundamental constitutional error.”

“She ignored the public trial right entirely. It’s as though she didn’t know it existed.” The mistake suggests more trouble ahead as the former president’s second criminal trial moves forward.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has broken ranks with some of her colleagues—most notably Samuel Alito—to call for a formal code of ethics for the nation’s highest court.

The Supreme Court has been mired in controversy since the spring, in the wake of reports that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted lavish gifts from billionaire Republican donors. Many people have called on the court to establish an ethics code to help prevent such situations in the future—which the justices have resisted.

But “it just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial,” Kagan said Thursday at a judicial conference. “Can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is: yes.”

It’s hard to see Kagan’s comment as anything other than a direct response to her fellow justice Samuel Alito, although she said it was not. Alito recently said Congress should back off from trying to regulate the court.

“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

This is untrue, as Section III of the Constitution explicitly says that Congress can determine how to organize the court, and Kagan stated as much. “Of course, Congress can regulate various aspects of what the Supreme Court does,” she said. “Congress funds the Supreme Court. Congress historically has made changes to the court’s structure and composition. Congress has made changes to the court’s appellate jurisdiction.”

Chief Justice John Roberts has also begged Congress to stay out of the court’s business—but that may be because he has since come under fire for shady behavior too, albeit of a much less brazen variety than his colleagues Thomas and Alito. His wife, Jane Roberts, has allegedly been paid more than $10 million by multiple law firms—at least one of which argued a case before her husband, after it had already paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Thomas has for years accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, in the form of island-hopping yacht vacations. The Nazi memorabilia collector also paid for Thomas’s nephew’s tuition, and he bought a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Thomas also has repeatedly refused to recuse himself from cases that relate to the January 6 riot—despite the fact that his wife, Ginni Thomas, is a major right-wing activist who encouraged then–chief of staff Mark Meadows to overturn the election.

Alito accepted a luxury vacation from a billionaire Republican megadonor as well. Right-wing activist (and then–head of the Federalist Society) Leonard Leo helped organize the trip, and also attended.

And the scrutiny is not limited to the conservative justices: Justice Sonia Sotomayor is under fire after the Associated Press reported that her staffers pressured institutions where she was scheduled to speak to buy hundreds, even thousands, of copies of her books.

Congress finally made a move to rein in the court two weeks ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics. The measure would create rigorous new financial disclosure rules, as well as establish a process for submitting and investigating ethics complaints against the justices.

The bill will have a hard time passing the Senate, though, where Democrats have a razor-thin majority. It is unlikely to pass the House at all because the chamber is controlled by Republicans, who have accused the left of trying to “delegitimize” the Supreme Court (although the court seems to be doing that just fine on its own).