A jury found Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House.

The verdict was announced in a federal courtroom in New York City on the first day of deliberations. Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, but found Trump liable for sexual abuse and for defaming Carroll after she made her allegations public.

Trump chose not to attend the civil trial and was absent when the verdict was read.

Carroll nodded as the verdict was read. Afterward, her lawyers put their arms around her, and she hugged supporters in the gallery, smiling through tears.

Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, shook hands with Carroll and hugged her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan. As the courtroom cleared, Carroll could be heard laughing and crying.

In a statement released Tuesday night, Carroll celebrated the decision, saying that "the world finally knows the truth."

"I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back," Carroll said. "This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed."

Trump immediately lashed out with a statement on his social media site, claiming again that he does not know Carroll and referring to the verdict as “a disgrace” and “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

No one is above the law — not even former presidents, Kaplan said in the same statement. 

"For far too long, survivors of sexual assault face a wall of doubt and intimidation when coming forward. We hope and believe this verdict will be an important step in tearing that wall down," Kaplan said. "This is a victory not only for E. Jean but for all victims and survivors."

The trial’s outcome was a validation for Carroll, one of more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual assault or harassment. She went public in 2019 with her allegation that the Republican raped her in the dressing room of a posh Manhattan department store.

Trump, 76, denied it, saying he never encountered Carroll at the store and did not know her. He has called her a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell a memoir.

Carroll, 79, had sought unspecified damages, plus a retraction of what she said were Trump’s defamatory denials of her claims.

The trial revisited the lightning-rod topic of Trump’s conduct toward women.

Carroll gave multiple days of frank, occasionally emotional testimony, buttressed by two friends who told jurors she reported the alleged attack to them in the moments and day afterward.

Jurors also heard from Jessica Leeds, a former stockbroker who testified that Trump abruptly groped her against her will on an airplane in the 1970s, and from Natasha Stoynoff, a writer who said Trump forcibly kissed her against her will while she was interviewing him for a 2005 article.

The six-man, three-woman jury also saw the well-known 2005 “Access Hollywood” hot mic recording of Trump talking about kissing and grabbing women without asking.

The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll, Leeds and Stoynoff have done.

The verdict comes as Trump is facing an accelerating swirl of legal risks.

He’s fighting a New York criminal case related to hush money payments made to a porn actor. The state attorney general has sued him, his family and his business over alleged financial wrongdoing.

Trump is also contending with investigations elsewhere into his possible mishandling of classified documents, his actions after the 2020 election and his activities during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump denies wrongdoing in all of those matters.

It also comes as the former president mounts a third White House bid. Some prominent Republicans criticized Trump after the verdict was read, while others in his party took to his defense.

In a statement, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is challenging Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, said that Tuesday's verdict "should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump."

When asked by CBS News about the verdict, Texas Sen. John Cornyn said, "I don’t think [Trump] can get elected."

"You have to appeal to a broader spectrum of people and he just never seems to try to do that," Cornyn said. "So to me, that's the reason why I don't think he can get elected ... the fact is that I do not think he can win the presidency regardless of what you think about him as an individual."

South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds told reporters he would have a "difficult time" supporting someone found liable of battery. "You never like to hear a former president has been found in civil court guilty of those types of actions."

"I think we need to do better," Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon told reporters. "If we don't have the right person as our nominee for president, we will lose the White House again, we will lose the House majority and we will likely not pick up the Senate."

Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told reporters that while he'd "rather have a president that isn’t found liable for battery," he did not rule out supporting Trump.

"It’s not a disqualifier, but it’s certainly not a check in the plus column," Cramer said.

When asked if he thinks the verdict will harm Trump's chances to become the 2024 GOP nominee, Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty called Tuesday's ruling "the latest act" of what he branded a "legal circus in Manhattan."

"I don't think this is having an impact on the American public's viewpoint," Hagerty said on Fox News, before pivoting to criticism of the Biden administration's economic and immigration policies. 

"We've seen President Trump under attack since before he became president, his has been going on for years," Hagerty said. "And he has been amazing in his ability to weather these sorts of attacks and the American public has been amazing in their support for him."

Carroll, who penned an Elle magazine advice column for 27 years, has also written for magazines and “Saturday Night Live.” She and Trump were in social circles that overlapped at a 1987 party, where a photo documented them and their then-spouses interacting. Trump has said he doesn’t remember it.

According to Carroll, she ended up in a dressing room with Trump after they ran into each other at Bergdorf Goodman on an unspecified Thursday evening in spring 1996.

They took an impromptu jaunt to the lingerie department so he could search for a women’s gift, and soon were teasing each other about trying on a skimpy bodysuit, Carroll testified. To her, it seemed like comedy, something like her 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which a man admires himself in a mirror.

But then, she said, Trump slammed the door, pinned her against a wall, planted his mouth on hers, yanked her tights down and raped her as she tried to break away. Carroll said she ultimately pushed him off with her knee and immediately left the store.

“I always think back to why I walked in there to get myself in that situation,” she testified, her voice breaking, “but I’m proud to say I did get out.”

She soon confided in two friends, according to her and them. But she never called police or told anyone else — or noted it in her diary — until her memoir was published in 2019.

Carroll said she kept silent out of fear that Trump would retaliate, out of shame and out of a sense that other people quietly denigrate rape victims and see them as somewhat responsible for being attacked.

Trump weighed in on the case from afar, branding it “a made up SCAM” in a social media post early in the trial. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the comments “entirely inappropriate” and warned that the ex-president could cause himself more legal woes if he kept it up.

Tacopina told the jury Carroll made up her claims after hearing about a 2012 “Law and Order” episode in which a woman is raped in the dressing room of the lingerie section of a Bergdorf Goodman store.

Carroll “cannot produce any objective evidence to back up her claim because it didn’t happen,” he told jurors. He accused her of “advancing a false claim of rape for money, for political reasons and for status.”

In questioning Carroll, he sought to cast doubt on her description of fighting off the far heavier Trump without dropping her handbag or ripping her tights, and without anyone around to hear or see them in the upscale retailer’s lingerie section.

The lawyer pressed her about — by her own account — not screaming, looking for help while fleeing the store, or seeking out medical attention, security video or the police.

Carroll reproached him.

“I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not,” she said.

There’s no possibility of Trump being charged with attacking Carroll, as the legal time limit has long since passed.

For similar reasons, she initially filed her civil case as a defamation lawsuit, saying Trump’s derogatory denials had subjected her to hatred, shredded her reputation and harmed her career.

Then, starting last fall, New York state gave people a chance to sue over sexual assault allegations that would otherwise be too old. Carroll was one of the first to file.