Donald Trump appears at a rally. E. Jean Carroll enters federal court in Manhattan for the first day of trial against him. (Photos l-r: Emily Elconin/Getty Images; AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)
On the first day of a landmark trial accusing him of rape, author E. Jean Carroll’s attorney emphasized to a nine-person jury that they won’t need to take her word that former President Donald Trump is a rapist.
“This is not a ‘he said, she said’ case,” said Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley.
In 2019, Carroll first stepped forward with her allegations against Trump in a book excerpt published in New York Magazine. Carroll has long claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her inside the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
During Crowley’s opening statement, she laid out the allegations in graphic detail, telling jurors that Trump “jammed” his hand up Carroll’s dress, pulled down her tights, and forced his penis inside her. Carroll then stayed silent for decades — at least publicly.
Unknown to the public at the time, Carroll told two of her friends: author Lisa Birnbach and local TV anchor Carol Martin, Crowley said.
One of the anticipated witnesses, Martin is expected to testify that she warned against stepping forward against Trump, who was then a real estate tycoon.
“In her view, Mr. Trump was way too powerful,” Crowley said, adding that Martin believed that Trump had “hundreds of lawyers” who would “bury” Carroll if she came forward.
Two other women, businesswoman Jessica Leeds and journalist Natasha Stoynoff, will testify that Trump cornered them, too. Leeds accused Trump of having groped her on an airplane in 1979.
Stoynoff claims that Trump cornered and forcibly kissed her some 25 years later, when she was on assignment to interview him and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago for People magazine.
Once Carroll joined their ranks among Trump’s accusers, Trump vehemently denied the allegations and went on a counterattack.
From Trump’s White House perch, Crowley said: “He went on the attack, seeking to destroy and humiliate her.”
In the remark that sparked a defamation lawsuit, Trump said of Carroll: “She’s not my type.”
“‘Not my type.’ We all know what that means: He was saying she was too ugly to assault,” Crowley noted.
Crowley argued that some of Trump’s statements since that time showed otherwise.
Trump first claimed that he never met her, but he was shown a black-and-white photograph of the two of them together at a deposition.
Then, Crowley said, Trump mixed up Carroll with his ex-wife Marla Maples, for whom he left Ivana Trump, the mother of three of his children.
This photograph of Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll at a party was embedded in her complaint.
“This will show you that Ms. Carroll was exactly his type,” Crowley told jurors.
During jury selection, none of the potential candidates said that they would consider the decades-long delay between the alleged sexual assault and her stepping forward a blot on her credibility.
Carroll’s legal team intends to call the author’s sister, Cande Carroll, who will testify that this silence was not unusual to the siblings who grew up in the shadow of World War II, the “grin and bear it” generation.
None of the jurors said that they believed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and none of them used his platform Truth Social.
Each time he asked these questions, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan noted that he heard “no affirmative response.”
Trump’s attorney Joseph Tacopina is expected to deliver the defense opening later in the day.
This is a developing story.
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