A clinical psychologist, Dr Leslie Lebowitz, was expected to tell a New York jury on Wednesday about the harm caused by Donald Trump’s alleged rape of the advice columnist E Jean Carroll.
Lebowitz, a trauma specialist, was also called to explain aspects of Carroll’s behaviour during and after the alleged 1996 attack, including her failure to scream or call the police, which Trump’s lawyers have attempted to portray as evidence she fabricated the incident.
Carroll is seeking damages for the alleged rape in a New York department store changing room, and for defamation, after Trump accused her of lying when she went public in 2019.
Lebowitz began testifying on Tuesday about Carroll’s state of mind following the alleged rape. She said the advice columnist had been harmed in three main ways.
These included suffering from “painful intrusive memories” for many years and a “diminishment” in how Carroll thinks and feels about herself. Lebowitz said perhaps the most prominent effect was that Carroll “manifests avoidance syndromes” that had stopped her having a romantic life.
Carroll testified earlier that she stopped having sex after the alleged assault, when she was 53.
“If I meet a man who is a possibility, it’s impossible for me to even look at him and smile,” she said.
“I am a happy person, basically. But I’m aware that I have lost out on one of the glorious experiences of any human being. Being in love with somebody else, making dinner with them, walking the dog together. I don’t have that.”
On Tuesday, a close friend of Carroll, Lisa Birnbach, told the jury she received a distressed call from the “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional” advice columnist within minutes of Trump allegedly raping her.
“She said: ‘Lisa, you’re not going to believe what happened to me’,” Birnbach said.
The writer and magazine editor described Carroll giving a brief description of meeting Trump at the entrance to the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman and how they decided to shop together. Birnbach said Carroll described Trump pinning her to a changing room wall, pulling down her tights and forcing first his fingers then his penis into her vagina.
Birnbach said she told Carroll: “E Jean, he raped you, you should go to the police.”
Carroll refused.
“She said: ‘Promise me you will never speak of this again and promise me you will tell no one,’” Birnbach testified. “And I promised both of those things.”
Birnbach said she kept the secret until Carroll went public with the accusation in 2019.
Asked why she was testifying, Birnbach said: “I’m here because I’m her friend and I want the world to know she’s telling the truth.”
Carroll’s legal team plans to call another of her friends, Carol Martin, to testify that the columnist also told her about the alleged assault at the time.
