Rudy Giuliani defended Donald Trumpwith wild on-air remarks after a jury ordered the former president to pay $83.3 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll on Friday.
Trump’s onetime personal attorney, in an interview with Newsman’s Rob Schmitt, declared that the legal system has “gone to hell” before calling U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the Carroll defamation trial, a “pure disgrace.”
Last year, Kaplan presided over a separate trial in which a jury found the former president liable for sexually abusing Carroll, who has maintained that Trump raped her in the 1990s, and awarded her $5 million in damages.
“First of all, he was found not guilty — or not liable for rape,” Giuliani told Schmitt.
“It was sexual assault, not rape. And second, you can be guilty of rape and still a person can be a wacko,” added Giuliani, who himself was recently ordered to pay millions in an unrelated defamation case.
Although the jury in last year’s Carroll trial did not find Trump liable for rape, Kaplan has said that this “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Kaplan said that the jury’s decision stemmed from the “narrow, technical” meaning of rape in New York penal law. He added that the rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”
Critics on social media mocked the on-air defense from Trump’s former personal attorney, saying that he “can’t tell the difference between a hotel and a garden center.”
“Rudy sure isn’t doing Trump any favors,” one person said, while another simply wrote, “Yikes.”
