A close friend of E. Jean Carroll testified Tuesday that the columnist telephoned her just minutes after she claimed to have had a violent 1990s encounter with Donald Trump in a luxury department store dressing room.
After hearing Carroll's account, Lisa Birnbach concluded that Carroll had been raped and urged her to contact police, according to her testimony in Manhattan federal court.
Birnbach testified at a civil trial a day after Carroll finished three days on the witness stand, where she described being raped by Trump in spring 1996 after a chance encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman store.
“I’m here because I am her friend, and I want the world to know that she is telling the truth,” said Birnbach, who, like Carroll, is a writer.
Birnbach said she was serving dinner to her two small children at home when an emotional and breathless Carroll called her between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. one day in early 1996.
“She said: ‘Lisa, you’re not going to believe what happened to me.’"
Then, Birnbach said, Carroll described Trump greeting her in a revolving door as she was leaving the department store.
“Hey, you're the advice lady,” she said Carroll told her Trump said before he tossed her a compliment or two, including “you're so smart,” and asked her if she would join him inside to choose a gift for a female friend.
Carroll did, but Trump rejected suggestions like a belt or sunglasses, before they went upstairs to the lingerie department, where they spotted a body suit, Birnbach recalled.
In a recollection that mirrored Carroll's testimony, Birnbach said she was told by her friend that Trump suggested that Carroll try on the body suit.
“She, continuing the jokey banter that they had, said: ‘Why don’t YOU try it on,'" Birnbach told the jury.
After they entered the dressing room, Trump slammed her against the wall, pinned her against the wall and pulled down her tights, Birnbach said Carroll told her.
She testified that her friend sounded like she was hyperventilating. “Her voice was doing all kinds of things. She may have been a little bit laughing.”
She said Carroll repeated “many times” that Trump pulled down her tights, ”like she was still processing it."
“And then he penetrated her,” Birnbach said her friend told her.
When she heard the word “penis,” Birnbach said, she went out of the kitchen even though she knew her children didn't know what the word meant, and whispered to her friend: “Jean, he raped you. You should go to the police."
But she said Carroll shut down that discussion and rejected Birnbach's offer to go with her to the police.
“We had a fight,” Birnbach recalled.
“She said: ‘Promise me you will never speak of this again. And promise me you will tell no one,’" Birnbach said.
Birnbach said she kept the promise for over two decades until Carroll spoke publicly about the Trump encounter after she wrote about it in a 2019 memoir. Birnbach noted that she was one of the individuals to whom Carroll dedicated the book.
Under questioning by lawyers on both sides, Birnbach admitted that she had written on social media that she believed Trump was a bad president who she suspected had never read a history book or the Constitution.
The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
