E Jean Carroll, writer who bested Trump in court, surrenders gun to police

E Jean Carroll said she had always had a gun, but decided to load it after she accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s. Photograph: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

New York writer E Jean Carroll has handed over a gun to police that she was keeping, but without a license, during her long legal battles with Donald Trump after she sued him over sexual abuse, according to a new report.

Police in Warwick, New York, “took possession” of the firearm after discussing the matter with the former Elle magazine columnist, NBC News reported, citing a police report the TV network had obtained.

Carroll told the Guardian in 2019 that she had always had a gun but had not kept it loaded until after she accused the former US president of raping her in the 1990s and entered civil litigation with Trump, which prompted her to load the revolver and put it next to her while she slept, out of security fears.

In May of last year, after a tumultuous civil trial, a jury in Manhattan found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store changing room 27 years prior, and awarded her $5m in compensatory and punitive damages. The jury cleared him of rape but the verdict meant that for the first time a former US president became legally branded as a sexual predator.

Less than a year later, another jury, sitting in a separate defamation case stemming from Trump calling Carroll a liar after she had accused him of sexually assaulting her, awarded her more than $83m.

The Warwick chief of police went to Carroll’s home in February “to discuss some open issues”, NBC reported the police report as saying, including that in January, Carroll had disclosed in federal court during the defamation trial that she had an unlicensed firearm.

She had told the court she kept a “high standard revolver, nine chambers” at home with ammunition “by my bed.”

The Warwick police report said that an officer offered to secure the pistol at the police station for safekeeping, until Carroll obtained a license.

Trump denies wrongdoing and ever knowing Carroll and has criticized her vehemently ever since she publicly made the allegations in 2019 in a book.