NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s lawyer sought Thursday to pick apart a decades-old rape claim against the former president, questioning why accuser E. Jean Carroll did not scream or seek help when Trump allegedly attacked her in a department store.
But Carroll, a writer and former advice columnist, rebuffed the suggestion that rape victims are supposed to act a certain way, saying such thinking deters women from coming forward.
“I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not,” Carroll said, her voice rising and breaking, at the federal civil trial in New York.
Carroll, who is suing Trump over the alleged assault, claims he raped her in a dressing room at the posh Manhattan store in 1996. She did not go to police and said she only told two close friends at the time.
Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina suggested her claims strained credulity, contending that she only came forward in 2019 — midway through Trump’s presidency — because of her disdain for his politics and because she wanted to sell copies of her book.
Trump, 76, says the encounter never happened, that he doesn’t know Carroll and that she’s not his “type” — comments that are at the heart of the defamation claims in Carroll’s lawsuit. The complaint seeks unspecified damages and a retraction of the comments.
Trump is not expected in court, though his lawyers have not entirely ruled it out. Jurors are expected to see parts of a videotaped deposition he gave in the case.
On Wednesday, Trump launched a counterattack against the trial on social media, telling followers on his Truth Social platform that the case was “a made up SCAM” and alluding to a DNA issue that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has barred from the trial.
The outburst drew a rebuke and a warning from Kaplan, who called it “entirely inappropriate.”
Consistent and unruffled in her second day of testimony, Carroll grew frustrated as Tacopina zeroed in on how she says she behaved during the alleged assault. She says it happened after a chance run-in with Trump at luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman in spring 1996.
“You can’t beat up on me because I didn’t scream,” Carroll forcefully told Tacopina. She had explained in earlier testimony that she was “not a screamer — I’m a fighter.”