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Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll tried unsuccessfully to get a man booted off the jury that found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse because he occasionally listens to the provocative podcaster Tim Pool, newly unsealed court records revealed Wednesday.
The 31-year-old male juror ultimately joined eight other anonymous jurors in delivering a unanimous verdict Tuesday awarding Carroll $5 million in damages, finding that Trump abused the magazine columnist in 1996 at a luxury Manhattan department store.
Trump denied ever knowing Carroll and said the encounter at Bergdorf Goodman never happened. The jury rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped.
At one point in the trial, Carroll’s attorneys secretly complained to the judge that the scale might be tipped against their client because Juror No. 77 “was biased in ways requiring his dismissal from the jury.”
In a court filing on April 30 that was initially sealed, they noted that the juror, a Bronx man who worked a job in security, had told the judge during the jury selection that he got his news from listening to Pool, whom Carroll’s lawyers described as “an extreme right-wing podcaster who consistently, aggressively, and unreservedly espouses highly prejudicial views on social and political issues directly implicated by this case.”
In arguing for removal of the juror, Carroll’s lawyers said Pool had at least twice on his show spoken of Carroll’s case, saying in a June 2019 episode: “This woman: Should we take her seriously? In my opinion, no.
