Donald Trump allegedly raped advice columnist E Jean Carroll during a chance encounter at an upmarket New York department store and then “destroyed” her career when he repeatedly lied about the claims, a civil jury in New York heard on Tuesday.
Ms Carroll, 79, is suing Mr Trump, 76, for battery and defamation in a civil trial in a US Federal Court in Lower Manhattan, the latest in a swirl of litigation surrounding the former president as he prepares to run for the White House in 2024.
Ms Carroll had been leaving Bergdorf Goodman on 5th Avenue some time in the spring of 1996 when she met Mr Trump at a revolving door entrance, Ms Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley told the jury in opening arguments.
She recognised Mr Trump as “that real estate guy”, and he knew her as “that advice columnist”, Ms Crowley said.
He told her that he wanted to find a gift for a female acquaintance and she agreed to help thinking it would be a funny story to tell her friends, the jury of six men and three women was told.
The pair took an escalator up to the 6th floor, and joked about who should try on a pair of lingerie, the court heard. The lingerie section was deserted, and they continued to exchange pleasantries as Mr Trump took her by the arm to a dressing room.
“Then when they went inside everything changed,” Ms Crowley said. “Suddenly nothing was funny.”
Mr Trump, who was “twice her size”, shoved Ms Carroll up against a wall and raped her, the court was told.
“She shoved, kicked, hit him with her purse,” while trying to break free, Ms Crowley said. The encounter lasted about three minutes, before the writer managed to escape.
The allegations closely matched Mr Trump’s “M.O.” of targeting women at random, she added.
Upon leaving the store Ms Carroll immediately called her friend, the journalist Lisa Birnbach, who advised her to go to the police, the court was told.
She confided in another friend, former WCBS television anchor Carol Martin, who advised her to remain silent given Mr Trump’s power and influence in New York at the time. Both friends will be called to testify during the trial.
“This is not a ‘he said, she said’,” Ms Crowley said.
Ms Carroll had grown up in a post-World War II generation of “grin and bear it”, and decided to remain silent, the jury was told.
The alleged sexual assault remained out of public view until the longtime Elle columnist published an excerpt from her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal in New York magazine in 2019.
Ms Crowley told the court that then-president Trump used the most powerful podium in the world to claim he had never met Ms Carroll and call her a liar.
“He went on the attack, seeking to destroy and humiliate her,” she said.
His claim that Ms Carroll was “not my type” really meant that “she was too ugly to assault”, Ms Crowley said.
“The most powerful person in the world called her a liar and a fraud.”
Ms Carroll was inundated with thousands of “hateful messages” and posts on social media, causing her career to go into freefall and suffer severe psychological harm.
Months later, she decided to sue for defamation.
Then after New York passed the Adult Survivors Act in 2022, which gave sexual assault survivors the opportunity to sue their alleged abusers, she filed a second lawsuit accusing Mr Trump of battery and defamation.
Ms Crowley told the jury that two other women, Natasha Stoynoff and Jessica Leeds, would testify to similar alleged encounters of sexual assault with Mr Trump.
The jury will be played the infamous Access Hollywood tapes, released weeks before the 2016 presidential election, in which Mr Trump bragged of being able to grab women by their private parts.
“This was not locker room talk,” Ms Crowley said, mimicking the explanation given by Mr Trump at the time. “It’s actually what he did to Ms Carroll and other women.”
Ms Crowley also showed the jury a photo of Ms Carroll with Mr Trump, and their respective spouses at the time John Johnson and Ivana Trump, taken about six years before the alleged Bergdorf Goodman encounter.
She said that in his deposition, Mr Trump had confused Ms Carroll with his second wife Marla Maples.
“Donald Trump pointed at Ms Carroll and mistook her for his wife, who he admitted was his type.”
In his opening statement, Mr Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina told the jurors that Ms Carroll was motivated by a hatred of the former president, and was seeking to boost sales of her book.
He said the allegations were deliberately vague and had changed since her 2019 article in New York magazine.
Mr Tacopina urged the jury to put aside any feelings they might have about the former president, and weigh the case on the evidence.
“Who would make up a story like this and who would believe it?” he said. “It’s people with a political bent, people with a financial motivation and people who want to be in the spotlight.”
Ms Carroll, who sat in the front of the court, looked directly at Mr Tacopina for much of his 45-minute statement to the jury.
“It’s all down to, do you believe the unbelievable,” Mr Tacopina told the nine jurors.
Ms Carroll is seeking monetary damages from the former president, who is not going to appear in person.
The case is expected to take five to 10 days.
