Judge Warns Trump Jurors Against Disclosing Identities

The Manhattan jury who found Donald Trump liable in the defamation and battery lawsuit brought against him by E. Jean Carroll was dismissed on Tuesday with a final warning from their presiding judge about revealing their identities.

The nine-person jury reached a mixed verdict after less than three hours of deliberations, finding that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and had defamed Carroll when he called her allegations a "con job" in a social media post in October 2022. Trump was not found liable for rape, although Carroll claimed that the former president had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York City in the mid-1990s.

The former Elle columnist was awarded $5 million in total damages by the jury, including $2 million in compensatory damages for her battery claim against Trump.

New York Judge Lewis Kaplan told the jury before dismissing them on Tuesday that they were now free to identify themselves to the public at their own discretion—but strongly advised against it.

"My advice to you is not to identify yourself," Kaplan said, according to a report from CNN. "Not now and not for a long time.

"If you're one who elects to speak to others and to identify yourselves to others, I direct you not to identify anyone else who sat on this jury," he continued. "Each of you owes that to the other whatever you decide for yourself."

Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama Administration and current national security analyst for CNN, also offered a word of advice to the jurors on Twitter in response to Kaplan's instructions.

"This is some post-verdict jury instruction: you could get killed or injured, certainly harassed, definitely trolled so don't identify yourself and don't identify anybody else," Kayyem wrote. "Trump's strongest legacy will always be violence as an extension of our democratic processes."

Throughout the trial, Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina repeatedly addressed that his client may evoke "strong feelings" from the public and had urged the jury to not let their opinions play into their final vote.

"People have very strong feelings about Donald Trump," he said in his opening statements last month. "You can hate Donald Trump, it's okay. There's a time and a secret place for that. It's called a ballot box. But not here in the court of law."

Trump, who never testified in his defense during the trial, has maintained that Carroll's accusations against him are false and claims that he has never met the former columnist before.

"I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE - A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!" the former president wrote in a post on his TruthSocial account Tuesday after the verdict was released.

In a statement to Newsweek on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Trump blamed the final verdict in Carroll's lawsuit on a "never-ending witch-hunt" from the Democratic Party that is attempting to undermine Trump's reelection campaign for 2024.

"The Democratic Party's never-ending witch-hunt of President Trump hit a new low today. In jurisdictions wholly controlled by the Democratic Party our nation's justice system is now compromised by extremist left-wing politics," read the statement. "We have allowed false and totally made-up claims from troubled individuals to interfere with our elections, doing great damage."

"Make no mistake, this entire bogus case is a political endeavor targeting President Trump because he is now an overwhelming front-runner to be once again elected President of the United States," the spokesperson added.

Update 5/9/23, 5:18 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional information and background.