The advice columnist E Jean Carroll sued Donald Trump for rape after she was encouraged to take legal action by George Conway, the husband of a top aide to the then president.
On her third day on the witness stand, Carroll told the jury hearing her lawsuit for battery and defamation over the alleged sexual assault in a New York department store changing room in 1996 that she did not intend to sue Trump until he called her a liar when she went public with her accusations more than two decades later.
Shortly afterwards she met Conway, a lawyer who was at the time married to Kellyanne Conway, one of the Trump White House’s most visible officials. George Conway was a vocal critic of the then president, to the embarrassment of his wife.
Carroll said that they spoke at a party where Conway laid out the difference between criminal and civil cases.
“George said: you should seriously think about this,” she told the jury of six men and three women.
Two days later, Carroll filed her first lawsuit against Trump, for defamation, after he called her a liar in denying the alleged rape at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman store.
As Carroll completed her testimony, she was also forced to deny that she had based her accusation on a 2012 episode of the television programme Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which involves a character talking about bursting into a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room as a woman tries on lingerie and raping her.
In her lawsuit, Carroll accuses Trump of guiding her to a dressing room to try on a piece of lingerie, shutting the door and sexually assaulting her.
Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, commented that the television programme appeared to be an “amazing coincidence”.
“Yes, it’s astonishing,” said Carroll.
She said she was aware of the episode after someone emailed her about it but never watched it.
“I haven’t seen it but this happens all the time on Law & Order stories,” she said. “I’m surprised this sort of plot is not seen more often.”
Later, Carroll’s lawyer, Michael Ferrara, asked her: “Are you making up your allegation based on a popular TV show?”
“No, no,” she responded.
Tacopina sought to characterise the lawsuit as politically motivated, in part through the association with Conway, who went on to recommend a lawyer to Carroll.
Tacopina contrasted that move – and a second more recent civil lawsuit for rape after a change in the law allowed for it – with Carroll’s decision not to take legal action against the former head of CBS, Les Moonves, whom she also accused of sexual assault in an elevator.
Carroll said that Moonves had not called her a liar.
“He simply denied it,” she said. “He didn’t call me names. He didn’t grind my face into the mud like Donald Trump did.”
Under cross-examination, Carroll defended her decision not to call the police after the alleged rape as the typical response of women of her generation who are “ashamed” to have been sexually assaulted.
She acknowledged that she frequently advised people to go to the police in her Elle magazine column, Ask E Jean.
“I was born in 1943. I’m a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught to keep our chins up and to not complain,” she said. “I would never call the police about something I am ashamed of.”
Carroll acknowledged she did call the police on one occasion, when she saw “loutish behaviour by some kids”.
Tacopina responded: “So your testimony is you’ll call the police if a mailbox is attacked but not if you are attacked?”
Carroll said it was.
“I will never, ever go to the police,” she said.
Asked why, then, more than two decades after the alleged rape she decided to go public, Carroll said that times had changed.
“I reached a point in my life at 76 where I was no longer going to stay silent,” she testified.
Tacopina pressed Carroll about her continued shopping trips to Bergdorf Goodman where she spent thousands of dollars in the following years.
“Bergdorf’s is not a place I’m afraid to enter,” she responded.
Tacopina also highlighted Carroll’s complimentary comments about Trump’s television show The Apprentice. Carroll said she was praising the construct of the programme as “witty”.
Brief re-cross by Tacopina:
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 1, 2023
Tacopina: "Are you happy, or are you not happy now?"
Carroll: "I'm happy."
Tacopina: "Ok."
Carroll: "with undertones."
"Of unhappiness," she explains.
Later this week, Carroll’s legal team is expected to call her friend Lisa Birnbach and another woman, Carol Martin, to testify that Carroll told them about the alleged assault shortly after it occurred. Both have since corroborated the account.
Carroll testified that Birnbach told her the alleged attack was rape and to call the police. But Martin advised her to keep quiet because Trump was a powerful businessman who would “bury” her.
Carroll kept her silence for more than two decades but changed her mind as other women came forward to recount their experiences of sexual assault and harassment as the #MeToo movement swept the US. She wrote a book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, detailing abuse of one kind or other by a number of men, including Trump. Excerpts were published in New York magazine in 2019.
Trump called Carroll’s allegations “a complete con job” and said her book “should be sold in the fiction section”.
“She completely made up a story that I met her at the doors of this crowded New York City department store and, within minutes, ‘swooned’ her. It is a hoax and a lie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Carroll’s legal team is also expected to call two other women. Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People magazine, is expected to testify that in 2005 Trump led her into an empty room and forcibly kissed her until he was interrupted. Jessica Leeds accuses Trump of assaulting her on a plane in 1979 by grabbing her breasts and trying to put his hand up her skirt.
