E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump, and Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Earlier this month, E. Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory. In a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-90s and for defamation in accusing her of trying to pull off a hoax.

But no sooner was that decision announced that the former president turned around and repeated his attack, using the same sort of defamatory insults that we've heard and grown so used to over the years. And he played it for laughs in his recent live interview on CNN. What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky-panky in a dressing room? E.G. and Carol has now filed an amended complaint

based on Trump's continued statements about the case. I spoke with Carol, along with her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is known for her work on sexual violence. So on May 9th, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in your suit against him. And not a day later, in Trump's inimitable fashion, he called you a whack job. And he made fun of you about what had happened to you during a CNN town hall broadcast around the world.

Tell me about watching that or experiencing that and what you felt. Well, David, the happiest day of my life was on May 9th. Robbie and I stood in that courtroom and heard nine jurors respond that we had been telling the truth. And

The moment of joy was so incredible. It was like a new world had opened up to me. And I think Robbie sort of felt the same. We were both just ascending. We have a great

We walk back into the office. Champagne is flying. Music is playing. We are literally dancing and tears of joy flying out of people's eyes. The next day, we are just getting used to being so happy in a new world. And I was so tired from being happy, I was in bed when CNN came.

started with the former president. And Robbie sent me the transcript of what Trump had said. And it was a plunge from the heights down to the depth. It was an amazing experience. I mean, the ride down was so swift and so sure. You know, it's easy to make an assumption that in the Me Too era, certainly since the

Harvey Weinstein reporting and so on, which, by the way, Robbie Kaplan knows quite a bit about these cases, that people take sexual assault more seriously. And yet you heard this laughter in the crowd and then you read what you read on Twitter. Now, life is not Twitter. And the full population of the United States was not in that room with Donald Trump. But it is numerous. Were you surprised by the reaction?

I was stunned by the reaction because it was not a slap against me. It was a slap against almost every single woman who was hearing him. Every woman who's just been merely pinched or grabbed. And then the guy laughs and denies it. Every woman.

hearing him saying those terrible things about me, I'm sure they felt as they were hurt like I was. Now, Robbie Kaplan, you have filed an amendment

to a separate defamation lawsuit that's still pending. Can you explain where we are legally? Yeah, it's complicated, so let me try to do it as simply as I can, David. When E. Jean wrote her book and an excerpt from it was published in New York Magazine, Trump responded almost immediately with what we call a three-day defamation rampage.

Kind of classic Trump. He ramped up the rhetoric each day saying cooler and more vicious things. And those were the statements that we originally sued him for defamation about.

That case, which is just limited to that defamation, we filed in the fall of 2017. And because he made those statements as president or he was let me withdraw that I would not say he made them as president because his job was president when he made those statements. It's gotten wrapped up in some very complicated technical issues about whether or not the Department of Justice should be the proper defendant.

whether the case should be dismissed because you can't sue a sitting president for something he does as president for defamation, et cetera. And it's been on kind of a Dickensian three-year path through the federal court system. And it's still pending. And that case is now before Judge Kaplan. The second case, which we affectionately call Carol 2, which was the case that was just tried,

That was for the underlying assault because New York passed a law that allowed women now to sue for assaults that happened outside the statute of limitations. And two, classic Trump, during the course of the case in October of last year, he made another defamatory statement and we added that to the case.

So that's the case that was just tried and we reached the verdict. And it was the underlying assault, which the jury said was $2 million in damages, and the 2022 defamation, which the jury said was $3 million in damages. But we still have Carol One. And if you think about it, it makes sense. That's where the damages are highest, because that's the first time he said this stuff about her. That's when it really damaged her reputation. That's when she lost her job. That was an advice column in Elle magazine that was discontinued.

Yeah. And so that's the case we want to go forward with before Judge Kaplan. And now we say we also, in that case, get punitive damages now because he kept on doing it. If anything, it's hard to imagine something that would better justify punitive damages than the defendant continuing to gauge in the tort. Robbie, what sort of timeline can we expect as this moves forward? Do you expect this to also go before a jury?

Yeah, but it will only go before jury, as I said before, on damages. So the question about whether Donald Trump's statements are defamatory, that's not been decided. You can't relitigate that. But a jury will be able to decide damages. Now, there are some people that ask, why pursue legal action? Do you think that it's ever going to change Donald Trump? How will this move the needle forward?

Either societally or where it comes to Donald Trump, who's now the frontrunner in the presidential race on the Republican side for 2024. Well, let me just I'm no political expert, so I can't speak to the politics of it. I can say things that I think we proved by a preponderance, but I think even by a higher standard in this trial. One is that Trump is a liar.

He lied about Eugene. He's done it now several times. He continues to do it. And he has a pattern in which he lies, the way in which he lies, which is he gets more vicious and more resolute and nastier over time.

And we saw that in terms of the three defamations now or the three different times he's defamed E.G. I'm sure they'll continue before we get to a jury again. And the jury saw that they saw the videotape of his deposition where he was clearly lying. And they concluded that he was a liar. One of the things I said in my closing argument is you have in order for Trump to win here, you have to believe that he's the only one telling the truth and that the 11 witnesses that he put on, they are all lying.

Well, we know which way the jury came out. They concluded that E. Jean and the 10 other witnesses were telling the truth and that Trump was a liar. E. Jean, I have to ask you, one of the more famous quotations by Donald Trump in the beginning of his presidential campaign was that even if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he could get away with it. Maybe I'm paraphrasing it, but that's more or less the quote. Do you think that era has ended with this decision in court?

I think we're ending it. Now, it's just not Robbie Capp and me in the nine-year. I think people are starting to recognize that when Donald Trump defames someone or when Donald Trump lies, people tend to believe it and they act on it. So hence, they attacked the Capitol when he said he won the election.

They attacked me because he said I'm a liar and that, you know, horrible things. And Robbie Kaplan has figured out the one way to stop him is to make him pay for lying. And if he were made to pay for shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue, I don't think he would have shot him.

money is precious to him. And Robby is going to go get some of his money for his lying. So what you're saying is that this is his moment of comeuppance. I think it just may be. Now, Trump did not appear in the courtroom in the last trial, and his lawyer did not call a single witness. Robby, how unusual is that? And how do you think that might have affected the verdict? It's unbelievably unusual.

David, in a civil case, I don't think I've ever had a civil case where no one from the defendant shows up. I think we all know why he didn't show up here, because I think he thought his lawyers definitely told him he would be in worse trouble if he showed up.

But to have an empty seat at the defense table is unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. And the jury definitely saw that. E. Jean, in great contrast, testified, I think it was for almost three and a half days, three days, about two and a half to three days ago.

calmly and unbelievably patiently took questions that were really, really hard to answer. And so the contrast between her standing up there, sitting up there, having taken an oath, patiently answering Joe Takapina's questions, and Trump not showing up, and then the only way they saw him was on video when I deposed him at Mar-a-Lago, and he spent a lot of the video just insulting both me and Eugene, the contrast could not have been clearer.

You were referring to her physical looks, correct? Just the overall. I look at her. I see her. I hear what she says. Whatever. You wouldn't be a choice of mine either, to be honest with you. I hope you're not insulted. I would not, under any circumstances, have any interest in you. I'm honest when I say it. She, I would not have any interest in.

Do you think, Robbie, that the that Donald Trump, considering his history, will follow the judge's instructions and amp down the rhetoric directed at E.G. because it doesn't seem so. No, I mean, not in the near term. I don't think he will. I don't think he can help himself, honestly. I don't think he has enough frontal lobe development in the frontal lobe of his brain to do that. On the other hand, the one thing is, as you said, he understands his money.

And at some point he'll understand that every time he does it, it's going to cost him a few million dollars. And that may make a difference. Although a few million dollars is a trivial sum for him. Well, that's what he says. We'll see. I'm not sure that he's got millions of dollars liquid lying around to pay the judgment here. While Donald Trump continues to trash talk you in the ugliest way imaginable, he's been fundraising off of the judgment in this lawsuit. What does that say about the country you live in?

Well, I love this country. I love how the how the federal court worked. I loved how the jury worked. I love it. I hate to be all positive about this, but I think we've made a difference. I really do. I really feel it. And I don't care what a blowhard he is and says all those terrible things. I think we're convincing people. I really do, David. Although his poll his poll numbers continue to thrive.

There's a certain segment of the society that, listen, a lot of people don't like women. There's a lot of women haters in this country. I hate to go this route. But you're, you know, and if there's any little thing that Robbie and I and the nine members of the jury can do defending our truth and letting people know that, yes, Donald Trump is a liar.

And he dragged me through the mud and he ground my face into the dirt. And yes, it happened. I think we can turn just enough women and men at the polls to make sure he doesn't become the next president.

I'm anyone who knows me would not tell you that I'm someone who's known for my unbridled optimism. But but there was one thing about this case that was very hopeful to me, probably the most hopeful thing. And that is in Trump. So no, I think he lies about lies about this. This was not a avocado toast eating jury. We had six men and three women.

We had one person from the Bronx, one person from Manhattan. All the rest were from north of Westchester. All nine jurors unanimously hearing the evidence in a court of law, according to the rules and with a judge who applied the rules fairly, found what they found. Now, the trick here is the world and social media, as you pointed out, David, is not a courtroom with the rules of evidence. And so I don't know how to kind of expand that out.

But it was very hopeful to me that this particular jury, which is, you know, not a New York City jury at all, not no one from Brooklyn. It just wasn't a New York City jury that they found and that they and they only took them two and a half hours. That was probably the most shocking part of it to me. Now, E.J., you're pretty frank about your political distaste for Donald Trump and wanting to see him defeated. And one could hardly blame you on any level for.

for saying that, but I have to ask you, Robbie, does that present you a problem as a lawyer? Well, so one of the arguments that they made in the case, in fact, their main defense in this case, and it's because they didn't have a better one, is that E. Jean was

Lisa Birnbach, her friend who she told at the time, who's a journalist, Carol wrote the preppy handbook. Carol Martin, who was a TV journalist for many years here in New York City, that they all got together at some point because they hate Trump so much that they decided to make up this lie about something that happened in 1996 and really hatch a conspiracy to bring him down.

And none of our witnesses, and we were very open about this, not a single one of our witnesses was a fan of Donald Trump's politically or for any other reason. But that didn't change the fact that they were all telling the truth. And so I think the jury, I'm not sure, I don't know to this day whether any of the jurors voted for Donald Trump. I'm pretty confident that they are all, some of them probably like things about Donald Trump.

But when they saw the evidence and when they saw the witnesses taking an oath and testifying there on the witness stand, they believed them and they did not believe that they were just willing to go and kind of lie and help Eugene and hatch this conspiracy just because they didn't like Donald Trump as president. Eugene, I have to ask, no matter how the rest of this case goes, whether there are damages recovered or not,

I want to ask about your life now. How's your life changed after the verdict? And how do you go on? What's it going to be like? Well, I just adopted a new dog, a great Pyrenees, the most moral of all dog breeds, the most moral, just the most wonderful. She's right here, Miss Havisham.

Sham for short. She's just arrived. My life goes on. I live, as you can see, in a tiny cabin. I will go on living in the tiny cabin. It's on an island the size of a mattress. It's in the mountains. But one thing has changed. I am going to dedicate myself to somehow figuring out a way for the women who don't have my platform.

to hold men accountable. And Robbie and I are going to put our heads together. We both are getting these letters. We've said we're going to figure out a way. And David, that's how my life is going to change. I'm a crone. I'm an elderly woman on a mountaintop. But I think we've got a few good years left to figure out a way to bring

Well, to end the cultural sexual violence. That's what I want to do. E.G. and Carol had a long career as a journalist, and she just filed an amended complaint in her lawsuit against former President Donald Trump. Roberta Kaplan is her attorney. You can read our coverage of the suit at newyorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. ♪

All right. Sorry about that. We've got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers. So I think we're back online here. Great. I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.

Despite some very embarrassing technical difficulties on Twitter, Ron DeSantis finally declared his candidacy for president. And he enters the race with an enormous war chest and name recognition, but he's also the object of daily rage from a familiar corner, Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump refers to DeSantis, of course, as de-sanctimonious and a lot worse. Welcome to the 2024 campaign.

DeSantis gained attention nationally during COVID, when Florida refused many of the recommended public health measures. And since then, he's been pursuing political vendettas seemingly designed to keep him in the headlines. Last fall, he chartered planes to fly migrants to the wealthy beach community of Martha's Vineyard. And he's embroiled in a titanic legal battle with the Disney Corporation and its CEO, Bob Iger.

Staff writer Dexter Filkins profiled Ron DeSantis in The New Yorker as his presidential ambitions were becoming quite clear. I talked with Dexter last year. Well, let's talk a little bit about his background. Who is Ron DeSantis? Where does he come from? What kind of person is he? He's from Florida. He was born in Jacksonville. He grew up outside of Tampa in a town called Dunedin. And it's a working class neighborhood. Working class guy. Went to public school there.

He was a great baseball player in Little League, where they won the World Series and in high school. And he went to Yale on a baseball scholarship and then on to Harvard Law School. So he's come a long way. Did he distinguish himself academically at Yale and then Harvard Law?

He did. He did. In fact, one of the more funny quotes that I got from one of his former classmates at Yale was, Ron was so smart that we couldn't plagiarize off of his papers because everyone would know where it came from because he's the only one that smart who could have made that argument. He's smart in what way?

More than a couple of people told me his memory is practically photographic. And particularly when I was having conversations about the coronavirus, that he was, you know, he was reading medical journals and he'd read them once. He would digest it. He wouldn't understand it and could have a conversation about it. Like he's very, very fast. How would you describe Ron DeSantis ideologically and how did he become that way?

It's hard to tell how much of Ron DeSantis is ideological and how much is opportunism. He sounds like Trump, except that he speaks in complete sentences. And he's very, very articulate and very, very quick. But he's competing for the same constituency. So...

He's very, very angry at the elites, even though he went to Harvard and Yale. He's very angry at Washington, he talks about. He's very angry at the politicians. And so he's kind of rallying basically the white working class of Florida, of which the numbers are still quite large today.

And he's angry. And we're going to make sure that parents are able to send their kid to kindergarten without having some of this stuff injected into their school curriculum. How did he become governor? My understanding is that although he's now seen as the dominant political figure in state politics, obviously Trump himself is in Palm Beach.

that DeSantis really kind of, he squeaked by to get in. He squeaked by. He did. I think he won by less than 1%. And I think there was at least one recount, automatic recount. He defeated a politician named Andrew Gillum, who had been the mayor of Tallahassee

Very, very close race. And I think he benefited from the fact that Gillum, not only was he black in a state, you know, former Confederacy, but also because Gillum came from the left of the party. And Gillum had squeaked in and sort of beaten a moderate party.

to get the nomination against Gwen Graham, who many people believed would have fared much better against DeSantis. But DeSantis won just by a hair, but he's just been a missile going straight up ever since. What do you mean? He has developed a style

which is very visible, very theatrical, again, very angry, but it has made him a national politician. And he really built, over the last couple of years, he really built himself and his persona, and I hate to use the word brand, but it's a brand, around the way that he dealt with the coronavirus. And essentially, it played in perfectly for him and his style because he could say,

I don't agree with Fauci and all the pinheads in Washington. And all they want to do is oppress you and make you wear masks and keep your children at home. And so he charted this very, very novel course on the coronavirus. And that's what made him famous. Now, the COVID policy that you describe is not just, you know, sheer obstinate ignorance. We've seen some of that in political quarters in the last few years, but something a little bit more complicated.

I had a long conversation with a professor at Stanford of public health, an epidemiologist named Jay Bhattacharya, who said he was sitting at home one day on a Sunday and his phone rang and it was Ron DeSantis and he wanted to talk about the coronavirus. And Bhattacharya, very much like DeSantis, were kind of charting a slightly different course. And basically, I'm going to make this a little crude, but it's essentially masking doesn't really work

The only thing you can really do is protect the elderly, which DeSantis did from the get-go. Protect the elderly and basically try to ride the virus out until a vaccine comes. But don't kid yourself. There's not that much that we can do about it. And so what followed from that, naturally, was keep the schools open.

Keep the government offices open, keep the beaches open, keep the shopping malls open. And that's what Florida did. Very, very different from, say, New York or California. And so I think the question is, is we can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state. And I can tell you, Florida, we're a free state. And how are its statistics? That's very, very interesting. I mean, kind of, you know, they went up and down and up and down and

He caught a lot of hell over the course of the pandemic. But the numbers aren't bad. I mean, Florida is in the middle when you look at death rates. It's pretty much in the middle of the pack right next to California. So, you know, California shut down their entire economy, all their schools for two years. Florida kept everything open. So he's looking better than he did.

Now, another issue that's been crucial to his presence on the national scene is LGBTQ issues and how they're taught in schools today.

DeSantis has been out front on that. He passed a law a couple of months ago called the Parental Rights in Education or the so-called Don't Say Gay Law where he supported it. What's the deal there? Tell me what happened and what role DeSantis plays there. Well, I think, again, it's – DeSantis has become a master lawyer.

at picking these issues that get everyone excited. Hot-button cultural issues. Super hot-button, yeah. And he's very, very good at sort of staking out a position and kind of pounding the table and saying, "I'm not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast." One of the stunning things about this episode is that DeSantis goes to war against a huge company in his state, against Disney.

It's remarkable. And he appears not to have suffered for it politically. Not yet. So describe the fight and what was the outcome? So they hate it when you say the don't say gay law, but that's how everybody understands it now. So I'm going to use that. The legislature passes the law. He signs it.

Disney's response initially in Orlando, Disney World, is tepid. And the employees, many employees at Disney World got angry at their CEO and said, this isn't enough. Like, we hate this. And so then the CEO came forward and

and condemned DeSantis and condemned the law. And then DeSantis basically went after Disney. And, you know, Disney, since it was built in the late 1960s, has basically had its own... Basically, it governs itself. If there's a fire at Disney World, Disney World has to put out the fire. And they have special accommodations in some ways. Yeah, very. And they govern themselves, essentially. They are left alone. And DeSantis just took that and threatened to zero out the entire special district for Disney World. Wow.

And when you talk to ordinary, say, ordinary voters or his supporters, that's what they love about him. You know, they would say, you know, any other politician would have caved into Disney. You know, would have backed down and said, I'm so sorry, and not Ron. So what's the purpose of the law in the first place? I hate to speculate as to his motives, but...

It made a lot of headlines all across the country. And I think just the kind of headlines that he wants to make... Which are what? Which is, when you see him speak, he says, I'm anti-woke. I'm anti-elites. I'm against the press. I'm against the pinhead politicians in Washington. And so he can position himself...

as very much as a kind of anti-elitist. He doesn't really need to do all that in Florida to win. I mean, he's got that constituency locked up anyway. So it's all national politics. That's what it seems like. I mean, I think his, every person I talk to who knows him says this is a deeply ambitious man. And he has had, he's had his eyes on the White House since he was in college and that every job he had was basically a stepping stone to the next one.

So you knocked on a lot of doors in the state of Florida in pursuit of a really deep peace on Ron DeSantis. One of the doors you knocked on was on the door of the father of Ron DeSantis. Describe that encounter. Well, you know, I had just come from the CPAC conference in Orlando where Ron Jr. spoke, pounding the table. That's the Conservative Political Action Committee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the big gathering.

And so I drove to Dunedin, a little town where they still live. I looked up his address. He was there. I pulled over into a McDonald's and like changed into a nice, put on like a white shirt on and long pants. And I went with absolutely no expectation of success. I went and knocked on the door. And it's a... As we learned to do as young reporters many years ago. Yeah, you think there's no way he's going to come out and talk to me. He probably won't even be there.

And Lombardi did. And he was wearing an FSU t-shirt, looked like he hadn't shaved in a couple of days, barefoot, shorts, nicest guy in the world. I mean, absolutely really nice. Didn't really want to talk to me at first, said I'm a little suspicious, I'll be frank with you. But then we had a really nice talk about his son.

How did he characterize him? He said, he said more than once, he said, well, Ron is, Ron is stubborn. And, and he, he gave a really, he told a very funny story about him, which was, you know, Ron's a very good baseball player. And my gosh, I must've thrown a half million pitches to him when he was young, right out there in the front yard.

And I think he only swung at 500 of them. He likes to walk. Well, and Fox has had a huge role in DeSantis' ascent. You did a public records request and got a lot of emails between Fox News and DeSantis' office. What did you learn from those emails? It's pretty amazing. It's basically a symbiotic relationship. It's kind of, you know,

DeSantis needs Fox to become a national figure. Fox needs somebody to replace Trump. They kind of find each other. And so over the course of the emails, they're each suggesting programs to the other. They're practically writing the questions for each other. They're saying, God, that was great. You know, we should make you a host of our show. And so it is so close that, you know, the idea of kind of the traditional idea of journalism, which is you keep your distance. Journalists keep their distance from politicians. I mean, that

That's all gone. Not so much. Yeah. And what's been the impact of his appearances on Fox? Is it quantifiable? I think so. It's quantifiable in the polls, which are, he is now far ahead of any other potential Republican nominee for the presidential election. And I think that's

With the exception of Trump. What is that relationship like? As I was told, Trump believes, with some justification, that he created DeSantis. He endorsed him during the primary, and DeSantis, who had been far behind, kind of just took off and won the nomination. And so I think...

Former President Trump expects a little bit of deference and a little bit more gratitude than he's been getting from DeSantis. As somebody put it to me, Ron refuses to kiss his ring. Or anything else. Dexter, thank you. Thanks, David. Staff writer Dexter Filkins. His 2022 profile of Ron DeSantis is at NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. I hope you enjoyed it. See you next time.

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