Trump groped me on flight, woman tells US rape trial

Retired businesswoman testifies in support of E. Jean Carroll, says former president sexually assaulted her on an airplane.

Donald Trump enjoys a round of golf at his Turnberry course in Scotland on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

A retired businesswoman has told a US federal jury that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her on an airplane decades ago, testifying in support of writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused the former president of raping her in a department store in the mid-1990s.

Jessica Leeds, 81, said on Tuesday that while she was on a plane in either 1978 or 1979, Mr Trump pulled her towards him, tried to kiss her, then grabbed her breast.

“It’s like he had forty zillion hands,” she told jurors.

Ms Leeds testified during the second week of the trial of the 2022 civil lawsuit filed by Ms Carroll against Mr Trump, which makes battery and defamation claims. Ms Carroll has alleged that Mr Trump raped her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City around 1996.

Mr Trump has denied the allegations, saying Ms Carroll is motivated by publicity and a desire to sell books. He has also denied Ms Leeds’s allegations.

A lawyer for Mr Trump told the judge presiding over the trial that Mr Trump wouldn’t testify. “It’s his call,” said judge Lewis Kaplan.

Ms Carroll’s lawyers earlier sought to bolster her account by presenting a friend whom she spoke to minutes after the assault. They had indicated they intended to call Ms Leeds as a witness to show Mr Trump had a pattern of abusing women. Another accuser is expected to testify this week.

Ms Leeds first spoke publicly about the alleged assault in a New York Times article a month before the 2016 election. She testified that she came forward after growing furious watching a debate between Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton. At the time, Mr Trump defended comments he had previously made about grabbing women as “locker-room talk”.

Ms Leeds said the encounter between her and Mr Trump lasted only a few seconds, ending when she got out of her seat after he tried to run his hand up her skirt. The two met again by chance a couple of years later in 1981, Ms Leeds testified, when she worked at a fundraiser for the Humane Society of New York. Mr Trump and his then-pregnant wife were guests, according to Ms Leeds.

She told the jury that when Mr Trump saw her, he gave a profane response. “I remember you. You’re that c..t from the airplane,” she recalled him saying.

During cross-examination, Joe Tacopina, a lawyer for Mr Trump, questioned why Ms Leeds didn’t know the precise date of the alleged attack and waited nearly 40 years to come forward.

He asked why no one on the plane interceded, even though she testified Mr Trump lunged at her as she got out of her seat.

“No one said a word?” he asked.

“No one,” she said.

“Including you?” he asked.

“Including me,” she said.

Earlier, a friend of Ms Carroll testified that the writer called her about five minutes after she was allegedly raped by Mr Trump, recounting in detail an encounter at Bergdorf Goodman.

Writer and magazine editor Lisa Birnbach is one of two women whom Ms Carroll has said she told about the alleged sexual assault shortly after it occurred in the mid-1990s. The two spoke on the phone for about three or four minutes, Ms Birnbach told the jury.

“She said, ‘Lisa, you’re not going to believe what happened to me,’ ” Ms Birnbach said. She recounted how Ms Carroll told her she ran into Mr Trump at Bergdorf’s, then went with him into a dressing room in the lingerie section: “E. Jean said to me many times, ‘He pulled down my tights, he pulled down my tights’.”

Ms Birnbach said Ms Carroll then told her how Mr Trump sexually assaulted her and she fought back.

Ms Birnbach told the jury she ducked out of the room, out of the earshot of her children. “I whispered, ‘E. Jean, he raped you. You should go to the police,’ ” she said.

“She said ‘I don’t want to go to the police’,” Ms Birnbach told the jury. She said Ms Carroll didn’t use the word rape but told her “We had a fight”.

During cross-examination, W. Perry Brandt, for Mr Trump, portrayed Ms Birnbach, a registered Democrat, as biased and politically motivated.

He read a series of comments Ms Birnbach had made about the former president, including during podcast interviews.

He asked if she had called Mr Trump “a Russian agent, a “narcissistic sociopath” and “delusional”.

“Sounds like something I would say,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal