A federal jury on Tuesday found Donald Trump liable after less than three hours of deliberation for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.

The prosecution showed remarkable courage and credibility over the course of three days of exhaustive testimony, especially under cross-examination. Trump attorney Joe Tacopina scored few points and lost many more in his overbearing and overlong attack on Carroll.

But as much as Carroll’s heroism, it was Trump’s extraordinary villainy that sealed his fate.

Consider the facts of the case apart from the involvement of a former United States president: a woman meets a man in a department store, flirts with him, and follows him into a dressing room, where he allegedly assaulted her. She hasn’t reported the episode in 30 years, and neither have her friends, who eventually show up to testify that she told them about it decades earlier.

Such a case sounds like an uphill battle. Most lawyers would shy away from bringing it on the strong possibility of a verdict for the defense.

What made the difference in this case is the character of the defendant and the plaintiff’s success in demonstrating it to the jury. During eight days of testimony, Carroll showed that Trump was a bully, a coward, and a predator.

Trump’s instinct as a bully is to humiliate and slander his critics. Rather than simply denying Carroll’s allegations, he insisted on degrading the case as a scam and Carroll as a whacker who was mentally ill. His truly Trumpian final blow was that the accuser wasn’t his type and I’d never be attracted to her, a needlessly vicious slur that haunted him when he confused Carroll with his ex-wife Marla Maples in a generally disastrous impeachment.

Moreover, despite his repeated brazen claims that he wanted to defend himself in court, Trump showed his cowardice by turning around and not doing so. People with litigation experience (myself included) predicted as much: Trump’s long record of lying would have resulted in a carnage of cross-examination and possibly exposure to multiple counts of perjury. Trump, who has spent most of the past few years desperately trying to avoid consequences for his behavior, has a well-known tendency to talk big and then fold.

Worse, Trump’s refusal to even appear in court almost certainly alienated the jury and allowed Carroll’s counsel to have a field day to wrap up the arguments.

“He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll,” Carroll attorney Michael Ferrara told the jury. “You should jump to the conclusion that’s because he did it.”

Trump’s belligerent lawyer had no viable answer to this argument.

Most damning, the evidence showed Trump was a sexual predator. Federal rules of evidence helped here, allowing the former president to be convicted of his propensity to attack women based on his past similar behavior.

The rules generally prohibit the introduction of previous bad deeds to suggest that a defendant has done it before, so you can be sure that he did it this time. That reasoning runs counter to our general social and legal obligation to judge a defendant by behavior rather than character.

But Congress has authorized such evidence in sexual assault cases. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan accordingly instructed the jury that evidence that Trump was previously involved in sexual assault can be considered his propensity to do so again.

The jury was therefore able to consider the testimony of two of Trump’s other alleged victims, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who had no conceivable reason to make up their stories, and conclude that if he did it to them, he most likely did it to Carroll. .

Perhaps the most memorable and damaging evidence of Trump’s proclivity for sexual predation was his own words on the infamous Access Hollywood tape: I’m not even waiting. And if you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. As Carroll’s attorney argued, this was more evidence of Trump’s abhorrent nature: Trump had revealed in his own words how he treats women.

The damning verdict will, of course, be ignored by the faction of the electorate willing to overlook or ignore any transgression by Trump, no matter how serious. But for the rest of us, the verdict stands for much more than his misconduct one afternoon in 1996. It’s a verdict from a character more abhorrent than that of any other figure to hold the presidency.

Harry Litman is the host of the

Talking Feds podcast

.

@harrylitman