Now that a Manhattan jury has found that Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll in a civil case filed against the former president, an interesting new wrinkle has come out.
According to BusinessInsider, [1] Trump maintained a long friendship with Roger Ailes, who is best known as the founder and CEO of Fox News. Ailes, who died in 2017, left the cable news network amid a flurry of sexual harassment accusations.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle Magazine, publicly accused [2] Trump in 2019 of raping her in the mid-1990s. Tuesday, a Manhattan federal court jury found the former president liable for civil claims of sexual abuse and for defamation, because Trump had called Carroll a liar. The jury awarded her $5 million.
All during this time, Trump in public comments and even during his deposition testimony, has maintained that he didn’t know Carroll. He repeated that in a SHOUTY Truth Social post after the jury’s verdict. He contends this is all a hoax and pretends innocence.
“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS,” he fumed. “THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
E. Jean Carroll had no comment leaving court after jury found Donald Trump liable of sexually abusing and defaming her.https://t.co/FYOK9ocE23 [3] pic.twitter.com/rutyEzhPnb [4]
— Jacob Shamsian ⚖️ (@JayShams) May 9, 2023 [5]
This is the part where Ailes comes in.
One of the reasons Carroll kept quiet about the alleged incident in the 1990s, she told the jury, is that Ailes was her boss at the time and was friends with Trump.
Prior to founding Fox and becoming CEO, Ailes founded and led America’s Talking, a cable TV channel that eventually became MSNBC. Carroll had her own show on America’s Talking. Called Ask E. Jean, it was based on her popular Elle Magazine column.
And Carroll and Ailes came into contact almost daily because he filmed his own show, Straightforward, in the same Fort Lee, New Jersey studio where Carroll filmed hers. The two “ran into each other almost every day,” Carroll told the jury. She testified [6] that she believed if she spoke up about Trump, Ailes would fire her.
“I would never report something like this, just for the obvious reasons. Roger Ailes would have fired me. He was friends with Donald Trump,” Carroll testified. “I would have lost my job at Elle. I was frightened of Donald Trump. I thought he would retaliate. I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault.”
And during the trial, Carroll’s lawyers argued that Trump did know Carroll at the time of the alleged rape. Carroll noted that he recognized her at the entrance of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, greeting her as “that advice lady.”
Carroll returned the greeting, calling him “that real estate tycoon” and they wandered through the store before he lured her into a dressing room and allegedly raped her, she testified.
In his recorded testimony, Trump said he and Ailes became friends “seven or eight years” before his November 2022 deposition, roughly around the time he was running for president in 2016.
Jurors, however, learned a completely different story about Trump’s friendship with the media mogul.
BusinessInsider notes that Ailes interviewed Trump for Straightforward in November 1995. A video of the interview was shown in court. It became entirely clear in the video that the two men had met on several other occasions. They talk about how they haven’t seen each other in “a little while.” Ailes comments that he’d recently seen Trump and his daughter Ivanka out and about. And Trump compliments Ailes on running his America’s Talking channel.
It was all very chummy.
For Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, this was problematic. She argued that Trump lying about not knowing Ailes created a problem for his credibility when considering her client’s rape allegations.
“You want to know why Donald Trump told me that lie?” Kaplan said in her closing argument Monday. “Because admitting that he knew Roger Ailes in the mid-1990s would be further proof that Donald Trump knew E. Jean Carroll.”
And since this was before the age of streaming, Carroll’s show ran at 11 p.m., and a rerun of Ailes’s show aired right after that, at midnight. This led Carroll’s lawyers to argue that Trump’s claims of not knowing her were nonsensical. They pointed out there was a good chance he caught the tail end of her show when he tuned in to watch Ailes’s program.
“If Donald Trump wanted to watch his friend Roger Ailes’ show, including the episode that he was featured on, that’s what he would have to do,” Kaplan said during her closing argument. “He would have to turn his TV to the America’s Talking channel, wait for Roger Ailes’ show to start and unless he did that at the exact right moment, he would have seen the end of E. Jean’s show.”
Kaplan also introduced [7] the infamous photo of Trump and Carroll chatting at a gala in 1987. And Trump, ever the avid TV watcher also very likely knew Carroll’s then-husband, news anchor John Johnson.
“Nice guy,” Trump said in his deposition, then caught himself.
“I thought, I mean. I don’t know him,” Trump said. “But I thought he was pretty good at what he did.”
Trump pulled out all the stops to cover his tracks but fortunately, he failed, and perhaps now, after all these years, E. Jean Carroll can have some peace, and perhaps all of the other women he has allegedly abused can think of this as a win for themselves as well. Trump is the first U.S. President to be arrested and now he’s the first to be considered a sexual abuser.
Now all we have to do is to wait for special counsel Jack Smith to present his findings. For once it feels like the right things are happening and I hope this continues.