"I am here because Donald Trump raped me," the writer and former journalist E. Jean Carroll said Wednesday in the civil trial in New York in which she is demanding compensation for damages.
On the second day of her trial in Manhattan Federal Court, the 79-year-old former columnist for Elle magazine spoke calmly but gravely before nine anonymous jurors - six men and three women - who will have to determine whether the alleged facts, which the former president denies, are susceptible to reparation.
"I'm here to get my life back on track," Carroll added.
The writer alleges that the Republican tycoon, in the middle of the race to reach the White House again in the 2024 elections, sexually assaulted her in a changing room of a luxury department store on Fifth Avenue in New York, in the middle of the decade. from 1990.
When Carroll wrote about it in a book published in 2019, What do we need men for (What do we need men for), the then president (2017-2021) said that it had not happened. "He lied and shattered my reputation," he maintained.
For more than an hour, the writer recounted a "funny New York scene": the chance meeting with the tycoon at the entrance to the department store. But the jokes in the women's lingerie section on the sixth floor turned into a nightmare in the fitting room.
According to her account, the then businessman and celebrity in New York, now 76 years old, recognized her because she wrote a column for Elle magazine, Ask E. Jean (Ask E. Jean), and invited her in a friendly tone. to help you choose a gift.
The tone was "very humorous". In the lingerie section, Trump chose a 'body'. Carroll still can't explain, more than 25 years later, how he was able to follow the tester, even though "comedy was escalating."
"He pushed me against the wall. I kept laughing, I wasn't sure. I didn't want to make a scene", but immediately after he "inserted" his fingers into her vagina, -"it was very painful, I can still feel it sitting here"- and then his penis. It all lasted "a very few minutes," she said.
"It prevented me from having a love life again," he confessed. When asked by her lawyer Mike Ferrara if she had had sexual relations since she was abused at age 52, Carroll answered in the negative.
The journalist did not tell it because "she was afraid of Donald Trump" and "ashamed." "I thought it was my fault," she said.
Trump was not present on the first two days of the trial and in principle his presence is not expected in this media process that can last between one and two weeks.
On Tuesday, Joe Tacopina, one of the magnate's defense attorneys, said the former journalist "abuses the system for money, for political reasons and for status," for which harsh questioning is expected.
Initially, Carroll sued Trump in 2019 for defamation since the alleged violation had prescribed.
But on November 24, 2022, a law came into force in the state of New York (Adult Survivors Act) that allows, for one year, victims of sexual assault to file lawsuits in civil justice.
As a result of that law, Carroll's defense filed a new lawsuit against Trump for "groping, groping and raping her."
Trump was indicted in early April for 34 counts of falsifying accounting records in paying black money to a porn actress to hide an extra-marital affair.
He is also being investigated for trying to reverse his defeat in the 2020 elections in the southern state of Georgia, for his alleged mishandling of classified documents taken from the White House and for his involvement in the storming of the United States Capitol on September 6. January 2021.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
