“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me.” That’s how E. Jean Carroll opened her testimony on Wednesday against Donald Trump in Manhattan Federal Court, according to the Associated Press. She continued, “When I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back.”
In a trial that began Monday, Carroll, 79, is suing Trump for defamation and battery, claiming he raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman. Trump has denied the allegations. He hasn’t attended the trial so far, but his lawyers said Tuesday it’s still possible he could decide to testify.
Carroll filed the lawsuit last fall under a New York’s Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 law that allows survivors of sexual assault to file claims against the people they say abused them, even if the statute of limitations has expired.
In the Nineties, when Carroll alleges Trump raped her, she was an advice columnist for Elle. When she bumped into Trump at a Bergdorf’s one evening in 1995 or 1996, she reportedly testified, he said “Hey, you are that advice lady,” to which she responded, “Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon.”
She said he asked for advice on buying a gift for a woman, and she went along, jokingly. When Trump picked up a sheer piece of lingerie and suggested she try it on, she quipped to him that he should be the one to try it on. She said they were “joshing,” and that she thought of the experience like it was a Saturday Night Live sketch — Carroll wrote for SNL in the Eighties.
She has said he asked her advice about selecting a gift for a woman, and she went along, thinking the experience would be funny. According to Carroll, they ended up in a lingerie department, joked with each other about who should try on a bodysuit and went to a dressing room. Carroll said she was flirting with Trump and the “comedy was escalating” when they entered a dressing room, according to reports from inside the courtroom.
Then, she reportedly testified, Trump shut the door, shoved her against the wall and penetrated her with his finger and then his penis. She described the alleged rape as “extremely painful.” “As I’m sitting here today, I still feel it,” she said.
She said she used her knee to push Trump away and quickly left the store afterward. She testified that she called two friends soon after. One told her to go to the police, she said, while the other advised against it. She said she didn’t report the rape out of shame and fear of retaliation.
After Carroll published her claims against Trump in a memoir in 2019, he called the allegation “totally false” and said Carroll was not his “type.” She sued him for defamation that year. Last October, he said on Truth Social that Carroll was lying and called her 2019 case against him a “hoax,” “scam,” “lie” and “complete con job.” In the 2022 case, Carroll re-asserted the 2019 allegations and added the October statements to support a claim of defamation against Trump. She also introduced the battery count.
Although Trump hasn’t yet attended court, he did try unsuccessfully to use his recent historic criminal indictment on charges related to hush money payments to delay the proceedings. He has also been posting — repeatedly — about the trial on his social media platform, Truth Social, despite the judge’s instructions to the contrary. On Wednesday morning, ahead of Carroll’s testimony, he called the case a “made up scam” and Carroll’s lawyer a “political operative.” He crowed, “This is a fraudulent & false story — Witch Hunt!”
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan was not happy. “Your client is basically endeavoring, certainly, to speak to his quote-unquote public, but, more troubling, the jury in this case about stuff that has no business being spoken about,” he said, and called Trump’s public posts “entirely inappropriate.”
The trial is expected to last one to two weeks. Carroll is seeking unspecified damages and a retraction of Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements about her.