A nine-person New York jury heard claims that Donald Trump raped a journalist in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and publicly disparaged her, as a civil trial the former US president has repeatedly attempted to delay begun on Tuesday.
E Jean Carroll sued Trump last year, after a new law in New York state allowed plaintiffs to pursue litigation over alleged sex crimes even once the statute of limitations had expired. Carroll has alleged Trump pinned her “against the wall” in a dressing room, forcibly removed her clothing and assaulted her, before she fled on to Fifth Avenue and called a friend.
“Filled with fear and shame, she kept silent for decades,” Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley told jurors during opening statements in Manhattan federal court. After having her integrity attacked by Trump while he was president, “she filed this lawsuit to restore her good name”, Crowley said.
The former president has denied knowing Carroll, and repeatedly claimed the allegations were not credible, in part because the former columnist was “not my type”.
Joe Tacopina, a lawyer for Trump, told the jury that Carroll, who was present in court, was minimising “true rape victims”. He urged the six men and three women — picked from a pool of roughly 150 people — to not “let her profit from the abuse of [the legal] process”.
Unlike in a criminal trial, the plaintiff need only prove that it was more likely than not that the assault in question took place, rather than the higher standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”. Trump cannot be jailed if he is found liable, and will probably file an appeal if so.
The trial comes just weeks after Trump appeared in a nearby Manhattan courthouse to face criminal charges brought by district attorney Alvin Bragg over the way payments allegedly used to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election were recorded in business filings. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
The former president’s other legal woes include a civil lawsuit from the New York attorney-general, who accuses Trump of inflating the value of his assets to procure favourable loans, and another investigation from prosecutors in Georgia over whether he attempted to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
Carroll, now 79, is expected to testify at trial, as are two friends in whom she allegedly confided soon after the attack.
Natasha Stoynoff and Jessica Leeds, who made their own allegations against Trump in 2016, are also expected to take the witness stand.
Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in March that the plaintiff’s team could introduce as evidence the so-called Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump brags about grabbing women by their genitals, after the former president’s lawyers had tried to claim that doing so would be “prejudicial”. Trump had described the judge, who was nominated by former Democratic president Bill Clinton, as “not a fan of mine”.
Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at the University of Michigan, said she worried the case could prove to be a “win-win” for Trump.
“If Carroll prevails on her claims of rape and defamation, Trump will probably spin his trial as a politically motivated attack. If Trump prevails at trial, then he will use this case as evidence that claims against him are hoaxes and witch hunts,” she said.
It is unclear whether Trump will appear in court, or testify in his own defence. Last week, the former president’s lawyers asked the judge to explain to the jury that if he did not appear, it was because of the logistical challenges involved. Kaplan denied the request, noting that Trump was due to appear at an event in New Hampshire for his latest presidential campaign this week.
Video clips of a sworn deposition that took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida in October 2022 — in which he called the lawsuit “a big, fat hoax” — will be played in court. The trial is set to last two weeks.
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