may be long, but it bans up and down, and up and down, towards justice. the damages awarded to e. jean carroll, $5 million, i didn t realize this, i am going to television law school, you went to actual law school. i didn t realize that the jury could assign a number to $1 figure if you will, to the wrongs that have been done to a plaintive. can you talk to me a little bit about how unusual it was for e. jean carroll to defer this decision to a jury, and to not file for a particular dollar amount? and also, whether the summit seems unusually high to you, or how do you think of the 5 million dollar price tag? i think that juries sometimes like to find round numbers and work backwards to allocate them. one of the things i thought was so unusual here was that e. jean carroll s lawyers in their closing made a very big deal of the fact that for her, this wasn t about money. they did that for two reasons. one, they were trying to
joining us now is lisa rubin, msnbc legal analyst who has been watching this trial from the start, and rebecca, writer at large for the new york magazine. thank you both for joining me on this very big day. you ve been through it all, and i ve got to say, when you are the lawyer for a defendant and you have to say, it didn t get him on the right thing, that seems like a thin defense given everything else that they got him on. he has. it is a very thin defense. and he knows what the impact of this liability finding is because even though it is not a criminal trial, he said to the jury, do not condemn this man as a rapist. in other words, he understood full well that while this is a simple trial, the impact of the finding would almost be tantamount to a criminal conviction even though that is not what it is. it would be a jury of his peers unanimously finding that the conduct itself happened, even if the punishment was not jail.
who condemned him in the immediate wake of the access hollywood tape before it became clear that he was going to barrel forward. i wouldn t read too much into the political tillis about what this is going to mean a for his candidacy. i just don t know. i don t know that we can predict that. i definitely agree with you that this matters. in many ways. it matters to have this litigated through the legal system and the process in a federal case by a jury. all of those are very different from the politicized fighting that takes place on fox news, or ideologically, and who can be accused of coming from the left, or coming from the right. this was a jury, and we know, lisa has talked about this, it was mixed ideologically. it was majority man, i think that it really does, at least temporarily, and i mean forever changed the nature of how this has been litigated, literally.
current republican front-runner and the 2024 presidential race has been found liable for sexual abuse. now president trump s lawyer in the case, he told press outside of the courthouse today that quote, he was found not liable for the rape and that is it. we are already starting to see bad narrative, the narrative that only focuses on that one finding by this jury. we are already starting to see that narrative take hold in the fringes of right-wing media. and former president trump is, of course, calling the trial unfair and a witch hunt. but check out how fox news reacted to this today. a witch hunt is sort of an obsession that you go on forever and in an investigative fashion, chasing after a case that doesn t really exist. whereas in this instance, people brought forward evidence, and it was presented to a jury, not to a panel of democrats,
deliberations were going to take a while. when i was sitting down, and was told the jury had reached a verdict, my jaw dropped. and i didn t know what to think. but he thought what he wanted, and it boomeranged on. him essentially what he said to the jury both in his opening and his closing was, everybody has strong feelings about donald trump and that is okay. there is a place for that, it is called the ballot box. when you enter this courtroom, you have an obligation to the rule of law. it looks like even the juror who listened to tim poll by his own admission, he listened to it. he listened. he upheld the rule of law. he put his political opinions at the courthouse store. and he listened to the evidence, and he found where the evidence took him. which is a liability for donald trump on both of the counts, both battery and defamation. rebecca, we are going to talk a lot today, and many days to come about the implications on this as far as donald trump