NEW YORK — The writer who sued Donald Trump for defamation over his claim that she falsely said he raped her in a Manhattan department store was pressed on her accusation by his lawyer during a long-awaited deposition.
E. Jean Carroll filed a partial transcript of the October testimony late Monday in federal court in New York to back her argument that Trump has already gathered most of the evidence he needs for a possible joint trial in April of two cases: her 2019 defamation lawsuit and a battery suit she brought against him last month. Trump is seeking to push back the trial until later in 2023 as a result of the new case.
The transcript shows Trump attorney Alina Habba eliciting information about Carroll’s love life and emotional turmoil, as well as fresh details of the alleged assault in the 1990s. In taking the testimony, Habba probed the nature of the alleged encounter.
“Have you ever questioned if what happened in that dressing room was rape?” she asked Carroll, according to the transcript of the Oct. 14 deposition.
“I question whether he thought it was rape,” Carroll said. “I never questioned what I thought.”
Habba asked Carroll if she had screamed during the alleged attack. Carroll said she hadn’t, but turned the question back on the lawyer.
“Every woman who admits to being attacked has to answer that question, ‘why didn’t you scream, why did you come forward when you did?’” she said.
Habba didn’t respond to a message seeking comment on Monday’s filing. Details of the deposition haven’t previously been made public.
A judge will hear arguments Wednesday on the timing of the two trials and whether to combine them.
The litigation is coming to a head as Trump runs for president in 2024 and as he faces an array of other legal dangers. On Monday, the congressional committee probing the events surrounding last year’s attack on the Capitol recommended he be prosecuted for his role.
At one point in the deposition, Habba asked Carroll, who is 79, why she didn’t go public with her claim right after the alleged assault, according to the transcript.
“I’m going to say something that even surprises me because women who have been raped are looked at in this society as less, are looked at as spoiled goods, are looked at as rather dumb to let themselves get attacked,” Carroll said.
Asked by Habba, Carroll said her decision to go public in 2019 had nothing to do with the prospect that Trump would run for president again in 2020.
Trump, who says Carroll made up the attack and that he had never even met her, was deposed by her lawyer at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The portion of that transcript included in Monday’s filing was fully redacted.
Carroll, who first described the alleged rape at Bergdorf Goodman in 2019 in New York magazine, testified that she ran into Trump while they were both shopping, browsed together while bantering and eventually entered the deserted lingerie section, where Trump said he wanted to buy something for a woman.
She described in detail the rape that allegedly followed as well as her escape, when she said she eventually pushed him away with her knee. Carroll, who was a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, described in her testimony her conversation with Trump before the alleged assault, saying he had mused about buying the luxury department store and jokingly mocked her age — 52 at the time.
She said she was shocked when a friend she confided in then told her she had been raped.
“I knew that I wasn’t going to tell anybody ever again about this,” she said.
Carroll also testified that she hadn’t had sex since the encounter, part of the suffering she said she has experienced, which could result in financial damages if she wins the battery case. She said she hadn’t dated much since then either.
“It’s not for lack of trying,” she said. “I wanted to meet people. I just — the music had stopped.”
“Why do you think the music had stopped?” Habba asked.
“Well, looking back on it, it may have been what happened at Bergdorf’s.”
The defamation case is Carroll v. Trump, 22-cv-10016, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
