CBS News
Trump’s comments about E. Jean Carroll caused up to $12.1 million in reputational damage, expert tells jury
It could cost as much as $12.1 million to repair the harm to the writer E. Jean Carroll’s reputation caused by a pair of defamatory statements former President Donald Trump made in 2019, a professor told a federal jury in New York on Thursday.
Thursday’s testimony by Northwestern University professor Ashlee Humphreys sought to quantify how many people saw and believed two statements Trump made denying he sexually assaulted, or had ever even met, Carroll. The judge overseeing Carroll’s suit against Trump has already determined the statements were defamatory, and the jury is tasked with determining what damages she should be awarded. A separate jury last year found Trump liable for sexual abuse and another defamatory statement.
Trump attended the first two days of the damages trial, but was not in the courtroom Thursday as Humphreys described how she quantified the harm done to Carroll. The former president was in Florida, attending his mother-in-law’s funeral.
In 2019, Carroll wrote a story in New York magazine accusing Trump of assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump vehemently denied the accusation. After coming forward, Carroll was the target of a torrent of criticism and graphic threats, including of rape and murder, some of which were displayed for the jury on Wednesday.
Humphreys said she calculated the harm to Carroll’s reputation by analyzing articles, tweets and TV broadcasts referencing both of Trump’s defamatory statements. She then determined how many people had seen the stories or segments on the same day they appeared. She concluded the damage to Carroll’s reputation as a journalist was “severe.”
Jane Rosenberg
She said there were as many as 104,132,285 impressions on those pieces on just the first day each was aired or published. As many as 24,788,657 viewers likely believed the claims, she said.
Humphreys said an analysis of comments made about Carroll before Trump’s defamatory statements showed she “was known as kind of a truth-teller, a sassy advice columnist.” Afterwards, Humphreys said she was perceived as “a liar, a Democratic operative.”
The cost of repairing Carroll’s reputation would range from $7.3 million to $12.1 million, Humphreys concluded.
Earlier Thursday, Carroll completed more than a day of testimony in the case. Under cross-examination, Trump attorney Alina Habba pointed out that there were celebrities who lauded Carroll after her trial victory over Trump in May 2023, when a jury awarded her $5 million. Habba asked Carroll if she’s more well-known now than before she first made her allegations.
“Yes, I’m more well-known, and I’m hated by a lot more people,” Carroll said.
Habba also displayed negative tweets that users posted during the five-hour period in 2019 between her allegations becoming public and Trump first commenting.
Under questioning by her own attorney, Roberta Kaplan, Carroll said that during that window she was the subject of mean tweets, but did not receive rape or death threats, and was not accused of being a Democratic operative working against Trump.
Kaplan also played a brief video clip of Trump repeating his denial of Carroll’s claims during a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday. Throughout the trial, Kaplan and other attorneys for Carroll have pointed to ongoing allegedly defamatory statements said by Trump, including in recent days, and indicated they want the jury to award more than just an amount needed to fix Carroll’s reputation.
They’ve said they want the jury to decide “how much money he should pay to get him to stop doing it.”
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Sen. Thom Tillis says “the scope” of Helene damage in North Carolina “is more like Katrina”
As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.
“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”
Hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast U.S. after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm. Helene brought heavy rain and catastrophic flooding to communities across multiple states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of the destruction. Officials previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina were washed out and inaccessible after the storm, hampering rescue operations, and several highways were blocked by mudslides.
Tillis said Sunday that most roads in the region likely remained closed due to flooding and debris. Water, electricity and other essential services still have not been fully restored.
“The scope of this storm is more like Katrina,” he said. “It may look like a flood to the outside observer, but again, this is a landmass roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, with damage distributed throughout. We have to get maximum resources on the ground immediately to finish rescue operations.”
Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead after it slammed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding neighborhoods and destroying infrastructure in and around New Orleans as well as in parts of the surrounding region. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. in the last 50 years, and the costliest storm on record.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 229, CBS News has confirmed, with at least 116 of those deaths reported in North Carolina alone. Officials have said they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts were ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police department in Asheville told CBS News Friday their officers were “actively working 75 cases of missing persons.”
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released $100 million in emergency funds for North Carolina to rebuild the roads and bridges damaged by the hurricane.
“We are providing this initial round of funding so there’s no delay getting roads repaired and reopened, and re-establishing critical routes,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration will be with North Carolina every step of the way, and today’s emergency funding to help get transportation networks back up and running safely will be followed by additional federal resources.”
President Biden previously announced that the federal government would cover “100%” of costs for debris removal and emergency protective measures in North Carolina for six months.
With North Carolina leaders working with a number of relief agencies to deal with the aftermath of the storm, Tillis urged federal officials to ramp up the resources being funneled into the state’s hardest-hit areas. The senator also addressed a surge in conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Biden Administration’s disaster response, which have been fueled by Republican political figures like former President Donald Trump.
Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the November presidential election, were diverting funds from Federal Emergency Management Agency that would support the relief effort in North Carolina toward initiatives for immigrants. He also said baselessly that the administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were withholding funds because many communities that were hit hardest are predominantly Republican. Elon Musk has shared false claims about FEMA, too.
“Many of these observations are not even from people on the ground,” Tillis said of those claims. “I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don’t need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”
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