E. Jean Carroll described the abuse she has faced over her lawsuit as her testimony in the trial over her allegations that former President Donald Trump raped her came to a close on Thursday.
Carroll returned to the stand in the morning after her lawyers began her direct examination Wednesday, stating that she thinks "rape is one of the most violent and horrible things that can happen to a woman or a man," according to reporting from CNN.
"I don't particularly like attention because – I'm suing. Getting attention for being raped is not – It's hard. Getting attention for making a great three-bean salad, that would be good," she said.
Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation. Carroll first claimed in her 2019 memoir that Trump violently raped in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the spring of 1996. She filed the defamation lawsuit after Trump accused her of lying. The former president has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Carroll had lobbied for the New York Adult Survivors Act that passed in 2022 and allowed her to sue Trump for battery long after the statute of limitations had passed, The New York Times reports. She explained what motivated her action to the jury on Thursday.
"It takes sometimes years to get the courage to face the person who hurt you, if at all," she said.
When her attorney, Mike Ferrara, presented Trump's Truth Social post from last year calling Carroll's first lawsuit a "con job" to the jury, Carroll explained how it affected her after recovering from a difficult time. According to The New York Times, Carroll has previously said Elle magazine fired her in 2019 and she began to publish on the newsletter platform Substack.
"I felt happy that I was back on my feet, had garnered some readers and feeling pretty good," she said, "and then boom: He knocks me back down again."
Soon after Trump's comments, Carroll continued, she was bombarded with similar insults online.
"A wave of slime, seedy comments, very denigrating. Almost an endless stream of people repeating what Donald Trump said," she explained, according to CNN. "The main thing was 'way too ugly' … It's very hard to get up in the morning receiving these messages that you are way too ugly to go on living, practically."
Carroll testified that the comments "particularly hurt, because I thought I had made it through."
When Ferrara asked if she regretted filing the suit and about her life in the last four years, she responded, "About 5 times a day."
"It doesn't feel pleasant to be under threat," Carroll added, describing the new "onslaught" of denigrating comments calling her "Liar, slug, ugly, old," that she saw upon checking Twitter Thursday morning.
Despite waking up to all the online vitriol, she told the court that she "couldn't be more proud to be here."
