Global Courant 2023-04-28 01:15:25
Writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleges in a lawsuit that Donald Trump raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s, was questioned Thursday by a lawyer for the former president who repeatedly suggested her claim was fabricated.
“Were you supposedly raped?” Trump attorney Joe Tacopina asked Carroll at the beginning of his cross-examination.
“I was raped,” Carroll replied.
Carroll, 79, claims the attack happened while shopping with Trump, 76, at a Manhattan department store in 1995 or 1996. She went public with her claim in 2019, which the then president mocked as a “hoax” she made up to promote sales of the book in which she made the claim.
Tacopina pressed her for details of the alleged attack in the afternoon, asking skeptically about her claim that she had no recollection of seeing other people on the sixth floor of the lingerie section of a Bergdorf Goodman, where she said she was raped in a bandage. room.
“I didn’t see anyone on the floor,” she said, telling Tacopina that her attention was focused on her conversation with Trump, which she thought was “funny” until he attacked her.
E. Jean Carroll arrives in Manhattan Federal Court on Thursday.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Tacopina asked why she didn’t “cry for help.”
“I am not a shouter. I was panicking, fighting,” she said visibly emotionally. “You can’t beat me up because I’m not yelling.”
Tacopina said he wasn’t.
“People always ask, ‘Why didn’t you yell?’ Some women scream, some don’t,” Carroll said.
“He raped me whether I screamed or not,” she sobbed in the stands while also speaking loudly. “If I tried to lie, I’d say I screamed my head off, but I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t screaming.”
After fleeing the store, Carroll said she called a friend, writer Lisa Birnbach, to tell her what had happened, and that she laughed during the conversation.
Tacopina quoted from Carroll’s book, writing that Birnbach told her it wasn’t funny, “but I couldn’t stop laughing.”
“You say that was the strangest thing of all?” Tacopina asked. “Yeah, absolutely,” replied Carroll, attributing her reaction to “full of adrenaline.”
She said Birnbach told her she had been raped and to call the police. “I said no,” Carroll said.
“I didn’t want to tell my story,” she testified. “I was afraid of Donald Trump.”
Asked if she would agree that not reporting the assault to the police is “a strange fact,” Carroll said, “No. A lot of women don’t go to the police and I can see why.”
“It’s the usual fact,” she added.
Earlier in the day, Carroll acknowledged to Tacopina that she has been a long-time Democrat, and that when she first heard Trump was running for president, “I was in disbelief. I felt really bad.’
He asked her about a passage about the attack in an earlier version of her book, in which she wrote that she went public because she didn’t like his policies as president.
Judge Lewis Kaplan presides as E. Jean Carroll is questioned Thursday. Elizabeth Williams/AP
The passage read: “After watching him for two years, he wants to kill me and he’s polluting my air, poisoning my water, boiling my planet, and as he piles the courts against my body, state by state, I’m afraid my free speech is next, so now I’ll tell you what happened,” Tacopina said.
Carroll said it was “a draft”, adding, “I said get that out before printing.”
The former advice columnist acknowledged she thought she’d reveal the attack in her book, “What Do We Need Men For? A modest proposal’ would help sales. “I was wrong,” she said.
In her trial and on the witness stand, Carroll said she was inspired to come forward by a New York Times story about allegations of sexual misconduct against film producer Harvey Weinstein.
She told Tacopina that that was indeed the inspiration, and that she believed if she came forward it could help fight “the culture of sexual violence” in the country.
“It made me realize that being silent doesn’t work,” she said.
During a direct inquiry earlier in the day, Carroll described the deluge of abuse she received online, following Trump’s insults toward her, including posts on his Truth Social account Wednesday accusing her of “swindling.”
“For example, this morning I thought I’d just take a look at my Twitter” and found an “assault” of “mean” posts, including posts calling her “slut,” “ugly” and “old,” Carroll said. Nevertheless, she added, “I couldn’t be more proud to be here.”
