Trump suffers big loss in E. Jean Carroll defamation case, judge says he’s liable

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims he had raped her decades earlier.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, as part of that ruling, said that the upcoming trial for Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Trump will only deal with the question of how much the former president should pay her in monetary damages for defaming her.

Normally, a jury would determine at trial whether a defendant is liable for civil damages claimed by a plaintiff.

But Kaplan found that Carroll...