Trump's friendship with Fox News founder Roger Ailes may have been his downfall in E. Jean Carroll trial
- Donald Trump continues to deny knowing E. Jean Carroll, even after a jury found he sexually abused her.
- He also denied being friends with Roger Ailes at the time he was Carroll's boss in the 1990s.
Donald Trump's long friendship with Roger Ailes may have doomed him as jurors weighed his credibility and ultimately found him of sexual abuse and defamation in E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, publicly accused Trump in 2019 of raping her in the mid-1990s. On Tuesday, a jury in Manhattan federal court found Trump liable for civil claims of sexual abuse and for defamation, over Trump calling Carroll a liar, and awarded her $5 million.
Trump, in public comments and deposition testimony, said he didn't know who Carroll even was. He repeated that claim in an all-caps Truth Social post following Tuesday's jury verdict. The whole thing, he says, is a hoax.
That brings us to Ailes.
One of the reasons Carroll didn't speak up about the alleged incident in the 1990s, she testified, is because Ailes, her boss at the time, was friends with Trump.
Ailes, who died in 2017, is best known now as the founder and longtime CEO of Fox News, who left the network in 2016 amid multiple sexual harassment accusations.
In the early 1990s, Ailes founded and led America's Talking, a cable TV channel that later became MSNBC. Carroll had her own show on America's Talking at the time, called "Ask E. Jean," based on her popular Elle magazine column.
Ailes often 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 said on the witness stand. If she spoke up about Trump, Carroll testified, she believed 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 in the trial. "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."
Carroll's lawyers argued in the trial that Trump, in fact, did know Carroll at the time of the alleged rape.
It was Trump who recognized Carroll before the alleged rape, Carroll says
Trump recognized Carroll at the entrance of the Bergdorf Goodman department store and greeted her as "that advice lady," she testified.
Carroll greeted Trump — who was a New York tabloid fixture at the time — as "that real estate tycoon," and they traversed through the store before Trump suddenly pinned her to a dressing room wall and raped her after they made their way up to the sixth floor, according to Carroll's testimony.
Trump testified he became friends with Ailes "seven or eight" years before his 2022 deposition, or around the time he ran for the 2016 presidential election.
But jurors saw a very different version of Trump's relationship with Ailes.
Ailes interviewed Trump for "Straightforward" in November 1995, a video of which was shown in court. At that time, the two have clearly met on multiple prior occasions. They banter about how they haven't seen each other in "a little while." Ailes comments about how he recently saw Trump out-and-about with his daughter Ivanka. And Trump compliments Ailes on running the America's Talking channel.
Trump lying about not knowing Ailes, Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan argued to the jury, is a problem for his credibility when assessing her client's rape allegations.
"You want to know why Donald Trump told me that lie?" Carroll's lawyer 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."
The rerun of Ailes's show aired at midnight, following the rerun of Carroll's show at 11 p.m. The notion that Trump wouldn't recognize Carroll, her lawyers argued, doesn't make any sense.
Before the age of streaming, an avid TV watcher like Trump would likely catch the end of Carroll's show as he waited for a rerun of Ailes's show to begin.
"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 in 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 brought other evidence that Trump knew Carroll at the time. She brought up a photo of them chatting at a gala in 1987.
Trump said in his deposition that Carroll was simply one among many people on a greeting line. But he also made it clear — the TV fan that he is — that he knew her then-husband in the photo, the news anchor John Johnson.
"Nice guy," Trump said in the deposition.
And then he caught himself.
"I thought, I mean. I don't know him," Trump said. "But I thought he was pretty good at what he did."