'Last year, Trump was found in a liable New York court of law for sexual abuse and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, who claimed that Trump raped her in a department store in 1996. In making their judgment, the jurors found that Trump sexually abused Carroll without explicitly saying he raped her.
After the decision was struck, Trump’s legal team was quick to celebrate his seeming exoneration of rape allegations. Yet, District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case, has said repeatedly in the months following that Trump, by all intents and purposes, did indeed rape Carroll, and that the distinction between “sexual abuse” and “rape” has importance only in a niche, legalistic sense, when parsing the difference between the definition of rape in New York and federal law.' MDC
