Nikki Haley said she has “trust” in the verdict passed down by a federal jury in New York against her rival, former President Donald Trump, that found him liable for defamation when he denied that he raped a woman.
Haley was appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when host Kristen Welker challenged the former UN ambassador under Trump: “Do you not trust the jury and their findings, ambassador?”
“I absolutely trust the jury. And I think that they made their decision based on the evidence,” Haley answered, adding, “I just don’t think that should take him off the ballot.”
“I think the American people will take him off the ballot. I think that’s the best way to go forward, is not let him play the victim. Let him play the loser. That’s what we want him to do at the end of the day,” Haley continued.
“I don’t think he should be taken off the ballot. I think the American people will decide if he’s disqualifying [sic] or not. We don’t do that … in America,” Haley responded. “Anybody that wants to run can run. And I think that’s really important. We have seen a lot of people try and infringe on our freedoms and our democracy.”
The New York jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to relationship advice columnist E. Jean Carroll for continuing to deny that he sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s after he was found liable for sexual assault in a civil suit brought by Carroll earlier in 2023.
The verdict has been lambasted by many commentators who say the veracity of Carroll’s allegations is questionable at best and that Carroll, along with the judge and jury, was blinded by an ideological hatred of Trump.
That was the assessment of Victor David Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, who wrote on X after the verdict, “The subtext of Trump’s rage, aside from the outrageous monetary size of the defamation ruling, is that he was facing — and angered — a leftwing claimant, a quite hostile leftwing judge, and a leftwing New York jury.”
Hanson added, “[Carroll], the alleged victim, did not remember even the year in which the purported sexual assault took place, nearly three decades ago. Observers have pointed out dozens of inconsistencies in her story.”
The Dallas Express reached out to Hanson about what this verdict means for Trump going forward. Responding via email, Hanson said “The result of this strange ruling inter alia makes it difficult for one accused to defend oneself of contested charges without incurring huge punitive damages, especially given Ms. Carroll’s employer said she had been fired for cause without connection to Trump’s invective.”
However, Jessica Leeds, another woman who claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1970s and who testified during the first civil trial noted above, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, “I am pleased. I am pleased for Jean [Carroll]. And I am pleased for what it says about our legal system and about taking the situation of sexual aggression seriously.”
Trump’s legal team plans to appeal the verdict on the grounds that the presiding judge, Lewis Kaplan, had mentored Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, decades earlier when they both worked at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison, but neither of the Kaplans disclosed this to the defense, reported Breitbart. The judge and attorney are reportedly not related.
“It was never disclosed. It’s insane and so incestuous,” said Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, per Breitbart.
