NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump's lawyer sought Thursday to pick apart a decades-old rape claim against the former president, questioning why accuser E. Jean Carroll did not scream or seek help when Trump allegedly attacked her in a department store.
But Carroll, a writer and magazine columnist, rebuffed Joseph Tacopina's suggestion that rape victims are supposed to act a certain way, saying such thinking deters women from coming forward.
“I’m telling you, he raped me whether I screamed or not," Carroll said, her voice rising and breaking, at the New York civil trial.
Carroll, who is suing Trump over the alleged assault, claims he raped her in a dressing room at the posh Manhattan store in the 1990s. She did not go to police and said she only told two close friends at the time.
Tacopina suggested her claims strained credulity, contending that she only came forward in 2019 — midway through Trump's presidency — because of her disdain for his politics and because she wanted to sell copies of her book.
Trump, 76, has repeatedly claimed the encounter never happened, that he doesn’t know Carroll and that she’s not his “type" — comments that are at the heart of the defamation claims in Carroll's lawsuit. The complaint seeks unspecified damages and a retraction of the comments.
Trump, who held a campaign event Thursday in Manchester, New Hampshire, is not expected to appear at the trial. Jurors are expected to see parts of a videotaped deposition he gave in the case.
On Wednesday, Trump launched a counterattack against the trial on social media, telling followers on his Truth Social platform that the case was “a made up SCAM” and that her lawyer is a political operative.
The outburst drew a rebuke and a warning from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who called it “entirely inappropriate.”
Otherwise consistent and unruffled in her second day of testimony, Carroll grew frustrated as Tacopina zeroed in on how she says she behaved during the assault, which she alleges sprung from a chance run-in with Trump at luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman in spring 1996.
“You can’t beat up on me because I didn’t scream,” an agitated Carroll told Tacopina.
Tacopina earlier irritated Carroll by using the word “supposedly” to cast doubt on her claim, drawing an immediate and stern rebuke from the writer.
“Not supposedly. I was raped,” she said.
“That’s your version, Ms. Carroll, that you were raped,” Tacopina said.
“Those are the facts,” she replied.
Tacopina also ticked off the judge, who said of his incredulous questions: “It’s argumentative, it’s repetitive and it’s inappropriate.”
Carroll, 79, said that if she were lying about the assault, she would’ve told people “I screamed my head off” to make it sound more plausible. She did, however, concede that some details of her story — including the lack of witnesses in a department store — were “difficult to conceive of.”
At first, Carroll said she felt charmed as Trump asked for her help finding a gift for a female friend. Eventually, she said, they made their way to the sixth-floor lingerie department, which was deserted of customers and sales associates. There, she said, they exchanged barbs about trying on a see-through garment before Trump led her into a dressing room, slammed the door and shoved her into the wall.
Even then, Carroll said, she couldn’t help but laugh and think there had been some mistake or misunderstanding. Only after Trump shoved her into the wall a second time did she realize their flirtatious frivolity was turning into a violent sexual attack, she said.
“I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on,” Carroll testified as several jurors listened attentively. “This was Donald Trump, I thought I knew him. We had been laughing 12, 15 seconds before. Here he was pushing me up against the wall. It didn’t make any sense.”
Carroll said Trump yanked down her tights and raped her before she kneed him and fled. She said she would have kept the accusation secret forever if not for the #MeToo movement, which empowered women to speak up in the wake of sexual assault claims against former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017.
The allegations against Weinstein surfaced the same day Carroll said she was embarking on a reporting trip for her book, which she originally envisioned as an homage to women who stood up to misbehaving men. The cultural shift changed the thesis of her book and later compelled her to disclose what she said Trump did to her, she said.
“I was flummoxed,” Carroll testified Thursday. She said she thought, “Wait a minute, can we actually speak up and not be pummeled?”
“The light dawned,” she said. The groundswell of women speaking out about sexual assault “caused me to realize that staying silent does not work, that if we speak up we have a chance of limiting the harm.”
She testified that she’s suing Trump “because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen.”
The trial results from a lawsuit Carroll filed in November after the state of New York enacted a law allowing adult victims of sexual assault to sue their attackers even if the assault occurred decades earlier.
The lawsuit contains one claim related directly to the alleged rape and a second claim stemming from remarks Trump made about Carroll’s claims last October.
Carroll said Thursday that a look at social media once the trial started revealed fresh insults against her as people labeled her a “liar, slut, ugly, old.”
“But I couldn’t be more proud to be here,” she testified.
The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
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Associated Press Writer Larry Neumeister contributed to this story.
Michael R. Sisak And Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press
