An attorney for former President Donald Trump wants a mistrial in the civil case involving his client and E. Jean Carroll, who filed the defamation lawsuit after the former president attacked her on Truth Social.
“E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance,” Donald Trump wrote in an Oct. 22, 2022 post on Truth Social. “Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to ‘Trump’!”
Carroll’s Claims Against Donald Trump
Carroll claimed that Trump raped her at a Manhattan department store in 1996 in her 2019 memoir “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.”
The legal saga between Carroll and Trump began while he was president in 2019 after she accused him of rape. The then-president told a reporter that her allegation against him was part of a Democratic Party conspiracy against him.
Carroll denied she moved to sue Trump to help sales of her book.
Manhattan Trial
The former president, currently traveling in Scotland, has avoided appearing in person at the trial.
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina accused Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan of engaging in “unfair and prejudicial” conduct against his client. He also criticized the judge for not allowing him to cross-examine Carroll about why she did not seek to obtain the security camera footage of the alleged rape.
Kaplan ruled last week that Tacopina could not discuss a claim that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was helping to fund Carroll’s case. He also warned Donald Trump and Eric Trump they could face serious legal consequences if they continue to disparage Carroll online.
Reports suggest that Tacopina’s effort to cross-examine Carroll went horribly wrong and reinforced her credibility.
Tacopina questioned Carroll about why she did not go to the police, to which she replied:
“Listen, I was ashamed of what happened … I thought it was my fault.”
He also asked her why she did not sue former CBS executive Les Moonves who she likewise claimed tried to sexually assault her.
“He didn’t grind my face into the mud the way Donald Trump did,” Carroll said.
Lisa Birnbach, a friend of Carroll’s, testified Tuesday in lurid detail how she had told her in 1996 that Trump had allegedly sexually violated her. Birnbach recalled on the stand that she had called her in the spring of 1996 and was “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional.”
Birnbach recalled that she had told Carroll to go to the police, but she refused.
“She said: ‘promise me you will never speak of this again and promise me you will tell no one,’” Birnbach testified. “And I promised both of those things.”
Birnbach also recalled that she thought it was foolish of Carroll to have gone into the dressing room alone with Trump. She also acknowledged having been a visceral political opponent of Trump’s over the years, calling him a “Russian agent” among other things.
To win the suit, Carroll must establish that a preponderance of evidence proves her case, which is a lower standard than in criminal proceedings in which guilt beyond a reasonable doubt can be proven.
Even if she wins, Trump’s loyal followers will still vote for him next year.
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John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.
