Who to believe in rape case – Donald Trump or 11 witnesses?

Jury in write E. Jean Carroll’s civil rape case against former president hears closing arguments.

E. Jean Carroll leaves Manhattan Federal Court on Monday. Picture: AFP

Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump made their final pitches to a Manhattan federal jury on Monday, clashing over whether evidence presented during the civil trial supported the writer’s account that the former president raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

Roberta Kaplan, for Ms Carroll, noted that Mr Trump hadn’t called any witnesses at trial.

“This is not a ‘he said, she said’ case,” said Ms Kaplan. “Instead it’s what Trump says versus what every single one of those 11 witnesses said when they testified in that chair over there.”

Mr Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, called the case “an affront to justice”, and said that Ms Carroll shouldn’t profit from it. He said that Mr Trump didn’t need witnesses because his defence was that she lied. “How do you prove a negative?” the lawyer said.

The closing arguments came at the end of a two-week trial of a lawsuit that Ms Carroll filed in 2022 against Mr Trump, after a New York law went into effect that temporarily extended the time under which survivors of ­alleged sexual assault can file civil lawsuits. The jury is expected to get the case after the judge provides legal instructions to guide their deliberations.

During her closing arguments, Ms Kaplan told the jury that in what was likely the spring of 1996, the writer ran into MrTrump at the entrance to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, near Trump Tower. After joking about trying on a bodysuit in the lingerie department, the pair went into a dressing room, she said, where Mr Trump pushed Ms Carroll against a wall and raped her.

Ms Kaplan ticked off a list of witnesses who supported that ­account, including two friends whom Ms Carroll spoke to after the incident, and other accusers who testified they were sexually assaulted by Mr Trump in a similar manner.

The lawyer said that Ms Carroll, who has made battery and defamation claims, had suffered reputational damage after Mr Trump attacked her on social media. She also hadn’t since had an intimate relationship with a man, Ms Kaplan said.

“What is the price for decades of living alone without companionship?” Ms Kaplan said to the jury. “I’m not going to put a number on that for you.”

She told the jury to consider the evidence and reach a monetary damages figure on its own. “For E. Jean Carroll, this lawsuit is not about the money,” she said.

Mr Tacopina played portions of a video deposition of Mr Trump in which the former president denied the incident and said he didn’t know Ms Carroll. He defended Mr Trump’s decision not to take the stand in the case.

“What could I have asked Mr Trump?” Mr Tacopina said. He later mockingly suggested, “Where were you on some unknown date?” Ms Carroll’s ­account of the alleged rape conveniently removed any witnesses, Mr Tacopina said. She testified that the sixth floor of the department store was empty and the dressing room door was left unlocked.

“She needed to create a scenario where no one else would be involved,” he said. He also questioned why Ms Carroll never told police about the alleged rape or spoke publicly about what happened for more than 20 years. The writer, who kept a diary her entire life, never documented the alleged attack, Mr Tacopina said.

“Ms Carroll made negative ­entries in her diary, just not that one,” he said.

He also attacked claims by two other women who testified that they, too, had been assaulted by Mr Trump. He called the account of one woman who accused Mr Trump of sexual assault on a plane “absurd”. He said the claims of a second woman, who accused Mr Trump of sexually assaulting her at Mar-a-Lago, weren’t for the jury to decide.

He said Ms Carroll’s lawyers were hoping jurors would be blind to inconsistencies because they hated Mr Trump. “Two things can be true at the same time,” he said. “You can think Donald Trump is a rude and crude person. And that her story makes no sense.”

The Wall Street Journal