The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said that the jury’s conclusion was that Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”

Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.

The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”