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Basically, because Trump is an idiot and Biden is not.
I don't believe Trump raped Carroll. She seems to me like a fantasist - possibly a crazy and malicious one, possibly just crazy. Either way, she seems pretty disconnected from reality. A good cross-examination should have destroyed her credibility. But the cross examination went terribly for Trump. And on the other side of the equation, he went and repeatedly made unnecessary false statements that diminished his own credibility (e.g. that he had never met her).
None of this proves he raped her of course. But it was a civil trial and the criminal law rules about giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt don't apply. The jury had to choose who they believed to be more credible based on what they were presented with in the courtroom.
And of course, there's the defamation element - which is actually where the big payout comes from. Listen to Biden denying the Tara Reade allegations - he says the claim is untrue, he points out that her story has changed, but he is careful not to accuse her of lying. Because that would give her a cause of action. Trump no doubt received similar legal advice but chose not to heed it.
And he continued to accuse her of lying even after he was found liable for sexual assault, and he continued to accuse her even after he had already been found to have defamed her in the first defamation case. And she has cause of action to sue him for defamation for a third time and get another payout! And when you keep doing the same thing you had to pay damages for already, don't be surprised when a jury decides that the penalty needs to scale up enough to actually deter you.
Biden said that Tara Read said untrue thing, Trump said E. Jean Carroll lied. That's a distinction without a difference. It's only meaningful to would-be intellectuals in the political and legal systems running augury-semantic power games.
It's not all like you say either: this case was deliberately weaponized against Trump, from the very beginning with the law that extended the statute of limitations in the first place. Yeah, sure, Trump is an idiot for not protecting himself from something that's never happened before. Biden is a mastermind. And I get to sit in judgment of both, because I've accepted the excuse du jour of rationalizing minds as something real that exists.
No it isn't. Lying is saying something true with deliberate intent to deceive or mislead. It is, by definition, only a subset of saying untrue things. One can say untrue things without lying by:
The difference is that those situations aren't generally considered to be a moral failing, while lying is. Therefore, it's derogatory to say a person is lying while it's neutral to say that what they said isn't true.
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Yes, it is a meaningful distinction to the legal system. The question was why does Trump get punished by the legal system. It's because he doesn't play by the rules of the legal system. You can like that or dislike that about him, but it's why he keeps losing in court.
I don't think much would have been different if the statute of limitations had not been changed, either. The defamation claim was not outside the statute of limitations, and without a seperate trial on the abuse claim itself the first defamation trial would have just become a de facto sexual assault trial like Depp v Heard. It would still have had the same outcome where repeating the same claims that had been judged defamatory would open him up to further litigation where he would be bound by the outcome of the previous trial.
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That's been a meaningful distinction for centuries, probably predating the Colonies.
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