E. Jean Carroll Lawyer Highlights the Moment Trump Screwed Himself Over

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer has revealed in a new interview that Donald Trump has only himself to blame for his two massive losses to the writer.

Roberta Kaplan represented Carroll in both of her lawsuits against Trump—and won both of them in the span of less than a year. Just last week, a jury determined Trump owes Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019 after she revealed he sexually abused her in the mid-1990s.

In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Kaplan said that Trump was the master of his own downfall.

“The single most important thing that convicted Donald Trump—both from his deposition and from the trial—is Donald Trump’s own behavior,” she said.

Carroll is far from the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, with at least 26 other women accusing him of some form of misconduct. Trump has vehemently denied all of the allegations, but he aimed particular vitriol at Carroll, singling her out both when she first accused him and multiple times during this most recent trial.

Targeting Carroll specifically is what ultimately landed Trump in legal trouble, Kaplan explained. In her deposition, Carroll alleged she had also been assaulted by television executive Les Moonves in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s.

In 2018, multiple other women accused Moonves of sexual assault. He stepped down as CEO of CBS and denied all of the allegations, including Carroll’s when she accused him a year later. Carroll said she didn’t sue Moonves because he had issued a blanket denial.

“If Donald Trump had done that here, I wouldn’t have sued him,” Carroll said, according to Kaplan. “She also said if Donald Trump had said that it happened, but he thought she consented, she wouldn’t have sued him. What was so offensive about it was the idea that she was just making it up to sell a book or two as part of a Democratic plot.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. He repeatedly claimed that she only accused him in order to garner publicity for her book. Her first lawsuit against him was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in November 2022.

During that first trial, Carroll’s lawyers played part of Trump’s video deposition, in which he brags about being able to get away with assaulting women. In the second trial, which Trump attended, he repeatedly got in trouble with the judge for his disruptive behavior. Kaplan believes that contributed to the massive amount of damages he now has to pay.

“One of the flaws—one of the huge mistakes that he made—is he really thought that showing up was going to make a difference,” Kaplan said. “He thought that the jury was going to be like at a MAGA rally. And he could not have been more mistaken in that regard.”