In the libel trial against former US President Donald Trump, a hearing scheduled for Monday in New York has been postponed to Wednesday. The reason was that one of the jurors had coronavirus, and Judge Lewis Kaplan sent the man home. In the civil lawsuit, columnist and author E. Jean Carroll is demanding more than ten million dollars (9.1 million euros) in damages from Trump for defamatory statements.
Carroll accuses Trump of raping her in a dressing room at the New York luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. The long-time columnist for “Elle” magazine first made her accusation public in 2019, when Trump was president. The Republican then accused Carroll of lying and said she wasn’t his “type.”
In a first trial last year, Trump was sentenced to five million dollars in damages and compensation for sexual abuse and defamation of the journalist. Two weeks after the verdict, Carroll called for even harsher punishment for Trump in an updated lawsuit after he again denied Carroll’s rape allegations and insulted her as a “crazy” during a live CNN town hall discussion in front of an audience of millions.
At the start of the second trial on Tuesday last week, both 77-year-old Trump and 80-year-old Carroll appeared in court in person. Trump was also present at Carroll’s testimony on Wednesday. Trump was scheduled to testify at the postponed hearing on Monday – one day before the highly anticipated presidential primary in New Hampshire.
