October 29 2025, 08:15 
E Jean Carroll, who won her lawsuit against Donald Trump in 2023 when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing her and defaming her and awarded her $5 million, explained one of the big reasons she thinks she won: Trump is just really unlikeable in person.
“I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat, elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and sits in a courtroom and moans and groans and complains and snorts,” Carroll told The Daily Beast Podcast.
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She explained that Trump sat in the courtroom scowling and squirming during the trial, and the jury noticed. “They were mesmerized, you have never seen anything like it.”
“He never sat still, and he talked the entire time within earshot of the jury,” Carroll said. “He belittled Alina Habba, his own attorney. He would spit as he was talking. He didn’t smell so good.”
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Carroll also talked about how Trump left the courtroom during closing arguments when her lawyer, out attorney Roberta Kaplan, was “asking the jury how much it would take to make him stop.”
“He stood up with steam coming off his back and hot air blowing out his ears,” Carroll recounted. “She drove him so crazy, he stood up in the courtroom and left.”
“When a man is innocent, he doesn’t storm out of a courtroom. He stays and fights. He turned tail and stormed out of the courtroom. He lost right at that second. He couldn’t have looked more guilty.”
When she found out that the jury believed her story and ruled in her favor, she “felt like Peter Pan who flies around the ceilings, and quite frankly, I’ve never come down from that. That win was so enormous and so powerful, not for me, not for Robbie, but for everybody in the country who had sort of lost hope that he could ever be beaten.”
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