Donald Trump had the deck stacked against him when a federal jury in New York found him guilty Tuesday of sexual abuse, according to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who said the result in the trial “makes me want to vote for him twice” in 2024.

“They’re going to do anything they can to keep him from winning. It ain’t gonna work…people are gonna see through the lines, a New York jury, he had no chance,” the Republican U.S. senator from Alabama reportedly told Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post.

Tuberville retweeted Bobic’s tweet, adding: “100% #MAGA”

E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, accused Trump of sexually abusing her in 1996.

The verdict was split: Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, finding Trump responsible for a less serious form of sexual assault. But the judgment adds to Trump’s legal woes and offers vindication to Carroll, whose allegations had been mocked and dismissed by Trump for years.

Jurors also found Trump liable 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.

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.” He promised to appeal.

Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, shook hands with Carroll and hugged her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, after the verdict was announced. Outside the courthouse, he told reporters the jury’s decision to rule in Trump’s favor on the rape claim, but still find him responsible for sexual assault, was “perplexing.”

“Part of me was obviously very happy that Donald Trump was not branded a rapist,” he said.

Carroll was 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.

Associated Press reporting was included in this story.