E. Jean Carroll arrives to Federal District Court to attend a hearing in New York on October 21, 2020. Carroll detailed her encounter with Donald Trump in the 1990s in testimony on Wednesday. File Photo by Justin Lane/EPA-EFE
April 27 (UPI) — Writer E. Jean Carroll on Thursday exchanged heated barbs with former President Donald Trump‘s lawyer and defended herself for not “screaming” during an alleged rape at a New York department store in the 1990s.
Carroll, the former Elle Magazine advice columnist, verbally sparred with attorney Joe Tacopina during cross-examination as he repeatedly grilled her on why she did not cry out during an encounter with Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman department store near Trump Tower in 1995 or 1996.
The line of questioning was meant to reinforce Trump’s defense in the civil trial that Carroll’s allegations are fiction partly because she didn’t attempt to get help at the time.
“I’m not a screamer,” Carroll testified during her second day on the witness stand, according to CNN. “I was too much in panic to scream.”
She added, “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming. Women who don’t come forward, one of the reasons they don’t come forward is they are asked why they didn’t scream. Some women scream, some women don’t. It keeps women silent.”
Growing more heated, Carroll said, “I’m telling you, he raped me whether I screamed or not. I don’t need an excuse for not screaming.”
Carroll’s rape allegations were first published in New York Magazine in June 2019 while Trump was president, with an excerpt from her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.
Attempting to refute another line of Trump’s defense, Carroll said she didn’t go public with her allegations in order to sell her book but rather was inspired by the #MeToo movement and the sexual assault case against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to break her years of silence, the Washington Post reported.
“Woman after woman stood up,” Carroll said. “I thought, well, this may be a way to change the culture of sexual violence. … I thought, we can actually change things if we all tell our stories.”
District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the trial, also engaged in some terse exchanges with Trump’s legal team during Thursday’s session, repeatedly accusing them of being “argumentative” and “repetitive” before dismissing jurors for the day.
Carroll filed the lawsuit in November, claiming Trump defamed her in a 2022 Truth Social post when he called her allegations a “hoax and a lie.” She added the battery charge after New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, allowing victims to file civil suits beyond the criminal statute of limitations.
Trump has denied meeting Carroll and claimed that he does not know who she is. His attorneys on Tuesday told the jury Carroll’s “story isn’t true,” saying she could not produce evidence or details including the date the alleged rape occurred.
In her first day of testimony on Wednesday, Carroll also attempted to explain why it has taken years for her to publicly tell her story.
“I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” Carroll said. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to get my life back.”
Carroll said she initially described the encounter with Trump as “high comedy.”
“He was very talkative on the escalator and said he was thinking of buying Bergdorf,” Carroll said of the encounter with both recognizing each other from a brief meeting previously at a party. “I was thinking, ‘I have a great story,’ and I was delighted to go to lingerie” with him.
Carroll said Trump was initially “pleasant and very funny,” and was stunned when she was attacked in a dressing room by him after she said they both suggested the other try on lingerie. She called her decision to go into the dressing room with Trump “very stupid.”
“He put his shoulder against me and held me against the wall,” she said in her testimony as Trump allegedly raped her. “I couldn’t see anything was happening, but I could certainly feel that pain.”
Carroll said one friend she told, Lisa Birnbach, told her to tell the police, but another, Carol Martin, dissuaded her because Trump was powerful and had a team of lawyers to defend him.
“I was ashamed, I thought it was my fault,” Carroll told the court.
Carroll said she had not had sex or formed a relationship since the encounter.
It was not immediately clear if Trump would testify, but he took to his social media platform Truth Social Wednesday to condemn the case as a “made up SCAM” and a “fraudulent and false story” prompting Judge Lewis Kaplan to tell his legal team the statements seemed “entirely inappropriate.”
“Your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his ‘public,’ but, more troublesome, to the jury in this case about stuff that has no business being spoken about,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan said the comments by Trump, and later posts by his son Eric, could constitute contempt of court.
The judge also suggested that more severe “remedies” might be necessary and urged Trump’s attorneys to have “a conversation with the client” before the trial continued Thursday.
