Trump Abruptly Storms Out of E. Jean Carroll Trial During Closing Arguments

Donald Trump stomped out of his defamation trial against E. Jean Carroll on Friday, just minutes after he entered the courtroom.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan was beginning her closing arguments before Trump’s tantrum. She said the trial was not just about getting Trump to stop defaming Carroll, but also to show that the former president isn’t above the law.

“Did [Trump] respect the jury verdict? No. Not at all. Not even for 24 hours,” Kaplan said.

Moments later, Trump got up and walked out of the courtroom. Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation to Carroll’s lawyer) interrupted the arguments to note Trump’s exit for the record.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. Friday’s trial was for comments that he made attacking Carroll in 2019.

Just hours after the jury issued its verdict in May, Trump launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during a disastrous CNN town hall. Carroll amended her second lawsuit to include those comments.

Trump already owes Carroll $5 million in damages from the first trial, and Carroll is seeking at least $24 million this time around. The current trial is just to set damages, because Judge Kaplan ruled in September that since Trump was already found liable for assaulting Carroll, his comments are by default defamatory.

But neither the multiple rulings against him nor the potentially steep cost of damages have deterred Trump from continuing to slam Carroll as a liar. Trump has gone on at least five long social media rants against Carroll just since the trial began last week. The first time was just before the trial began, and the second was—inexplicably—as he sat in the courtroom for the first day of the trial.

Trump set a personal record during the third, after his trial was delayed earlier this week (per his own lawyer’s request). That time, Trump made 42 posts about Carroll on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes. And then he made another 37 posts about her Wednesday, the night before his highly anticipated (and incredibly short) testimony. He also posted about Carroll Thursday night, pretending he had no idea who she is.

Private correspondence between Florida Representative Matt Gaetz and a close friend reveals that the MAGA lawmaker’s intentions in kicking out former Speaker Kevin McCarthy weren’t quite as clean as he claimed they were.

In private communications reviewed by The Daily Beast, Gaetz makes clear that his efforts to undercut and oust the former speaker were motivated by the renewed House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex. The source was so fearful of Gaetz’s retribution that the Beast could not quote or even refer to the type of communication for fear that Gaetz would identify them—but they shared information indicating that Gaetz singled out McCarthy individually for reviving the investigation, refusing to believe that McCarthy did not have singular control over its resurgence.

Gaetz initially led the crusade to oust McCarthy from the speaker’s office in October, claiming that he was caving to Democrats on a spending deal.

Since then, the truth has become clearer. Over the summer, the Floridian reportedly told a group of colleagues that his push to boot McCarthy was in direct response to the probe, while a senior GOP staffer recalled Gaetz complaining about Kevin due to the investigation, according to the outlet.

“As I’ve answered likely 100 times on the record, I led the charge to remove Kevin McCarthy from his role as House Speaker because he failed to keep his promises,” Gaetz said in a statement to the Beast. “The Daily Beast continues to lie about me, and I think it’s due for a round of layoffs.”

Meanwhile, the congressional investigation into Gaetz has entered a new phase, reportedly making contact with several new witnesses in recent weeks as it probes allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use, and public corruption by the MAGA Republican.

The accusations against Gaetz arise from a DOJ sex-trafficking probe into one of Gaetz’s friends, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, who was later convicted of sex trafficking. The initial probe also named Gaetz, who Greenberg claimed had paid him via Venmo in order to have sex with an underage girl in 2017.

A Wisconsin Republican representative says his medical background makes him an expert on abortion. The catch? Before being a state lawmaker, he was a veterinarian.

The Republican-controlled state Assembly voted 53–46 on Thursday to pass a bill to ask voters whether abortions should be banned after 14 weeks of pregnancy. The measure now goes to the Republican-led Senate.

During the two and a half hours of debate, Republican Representative Joel Kitchens tried to argue that abortion isn’t health care. And he should know, he said, because he was a vet.

“If you believe that a fetus is a human life, then abortion is not health care,” Kitchens said. “In my veterinary career, I did thousands of ultrasounds on animals.… So I think I know mammalian fetal development better than probably anyone here. And in my mind, there’s absolutely no question that’s a life. And I think the science backs me up on that.”

Kitchens’s offensive analogy implies that human women are no better than animals, who need someone else with a bigger brain to make their medical decisions for them.

“Abortion isn’t health care because women are kind of like dogs,” legal expert Elie Mystal dryly quipped on X (formerly Twitter), referring to Kitchens as a “forced birth veterinarian.”

Minnesota Senator Tina Smith was shocked at Kitchens’s comparison. “I can’t believe I have to say this but do not compare women to animals,” she wrote on X. “We’re humans capable of making our own health care decisions—including on abortion.”

Putting aside Kitchens’s incredibly disturbing dehumanization of pregnant people, it is also sometimes necessary to perform abortions on animals. When the pregnancy is no longer viable, such as due to a bacterial infection, it must be terminated. So even for animals, abortion is health care.

Wisconsin has banned abortion after 20 weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. The bill that passed Thursday would ban abortions 14 weeks after “probable fertilization,” with exceptions to save the patient’s life or health.

The measure also includes exception for rape and incest, but it was only amended to do so on Tuesday. One Republican representative said the exceptions weren’t initially included because she had “a really hard time believing that somebody who doesn’t know they’re pregnant at 14 weeks wants to know. Maybe they just don’t want to know.”

Democratic Representative Lisa Subeck shot back that lawmakers shouldn’t “make those judgments about what a 13-year-old who may be a victim of rape or incest may or may not know or may or may not have access to.”

The bill must first get approval from Democratic Governor Tony Evers before it goes on the ballot for voters. Evers has already indicated that he intends to veto the measure. He has repeatedly demonstrated his support for expanding reproductive care, including announcing during his State of the State speech on Tuesday that he was broadening access to contraception.

Even if the bill does make it to the ballot box, Badger State residents have already made it clear how they feel about abortion. State Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz was elected in April last year, beating her Republican opponent by a whopping 11 percentage points and flipping the court for the first time in 15 years. She campaigned heavily on her support for abortion rights.

Republicans around the country are throwing their hats behind Texas Governor Greg Abbott amid his escalating border security standoff with the federal government, seemingly attempting to transform the dispute into a “civil war,” according to several conservative commentators.

On Wednesday, Abbott declared the influx of immigrants across the border an “invasion”—a status that Abbott claimed supersedes federal mandates—and issued a statement on the state’s constitutional right to defend itself.

That was just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Joe Biden by declaring that Texas went outside its jurisdiction by erecting makeshift concertina wire fences along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border, effectively preventing the U.S. border patrol from doing their job. Texas has continued building new wire barriers since that ruling.

At least 25 Republican governors have declared their support for Abbott, including Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

“The Biden administration has turned every state into a border state. We must stop the flow of fentanyl, save lives, and secure our southern border,” Youngkin posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Texas, you can count on Alabama to have your back,” Ivey said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson also chimed in, roping the U.S. House of Representatives into the conflict by announcing that “the House will do everything in its power to back [Abbott] up.”

That, however, doesn’t seem to include advancing a border security deal within his own realm of government. Republicans all but killed a bipartisan border deal this week, for fear it could be interpreted as a political win for Biden as Donald Trump ramps up to make immigration a wedge issue in the upcoming election.

“Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” a source told HuffPost on Wednesday. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president.… He said he only wants the perfect deal.”

“The border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Utah Senator Mitt Romney told reporters on Thursday. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”

All eyes were on Donald Trump on Thursday as the former president finally took the stand in his second trial brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll. After weeks of drama between Judge Lewis Kaplan and attorney Alina Habba, during which the managing partner of Habba, Madaio & Associates LLP painted herself as an inexperienced attorney in way over her head, Trump was heavily anticipated to deliver bombastic testimony that would rock the courtroom. But then, he didn’t.

Moments before Trump took the stand, Kaplan set severe parameters for Trump’s appearance, alerting Habba that her client would not be allowed to reject the results of Carroll’s first trial against Trump, which found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer.

“The jury found that Mr. Trump inserted his fingers into her vagina. And that Ms. Carroll did not make up her claim. And that Mr. Trump’s June 11 and June 22 statements were defamatory. Now Mr. Trump may not make any argument against this,” Kaplan warned Habba, according to Inner City Press.

Then Kaplan notified Habba that she would only be permitted to ask Trump a couple of questions: whether or not the former president stood by his deposition testimony, and whether he ever instructed anyone to hurt Carroll.

At another point, Kaplan asked Habba to outline every detail that Trump planned to say on the stand, to which Habba replied that she couldn’t testify on behalf of her client, according to Politico’s Erica Orden.

Trump spent just three minutes in total on the stand, answering questions with minute flair that Kaplan immediately ordered the jury to disregard.

When asked if he instructed anyone to hurt Carroll, Trump responded in the negative.

“No, I just wanted to defend myself, my family and frankly, the presidency,” Trump said, before Kaplan interjected that the jury should ignore everything Trump said after “no.”

And when asked if he denied the allegation in order to defend himself, Trump again tried to push the judge’s boundaries.

“Yes, I did. That’s exactly right. She said something I considered a false accusation—” Trump began, before Kaplan told the jury to disregard everything after “Yes, I did.”

The aggressive strategy to keep Trump—and the courtroom—under control was likely inspired by the GOP front-runner’s rambunctious and threatening behavior during his New York bank fraud trial under Judge Arthur Engoron and his D.C. trial with Judge Tanya Chutkan, both of which resulted in seemingly ineffective gag orders on the former president.

And despite its anticlimactic finale, Kaplan’s strategy proved surprisingly effective at trial, generally cordoning off Trump’s more disruptive tendencies to outside the courtroom—something other judges haven’t been able to achieve. That may be thanks to Kaplan’s decades behind the bench, during which he presided over some of the biggest terrorism cases in the nation’s history. Those include closing the docket on Osama bin Laden following his death at the hands of Seal Team Six and presiding over the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the only Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in a civilian court.