In a Manhattan courtroom Thursday, a lawyer for former president Donald Trump asked E Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Trump of raping her nearly three decades ago, whether she had screamed for help.
“I’m not a screamer,” Ms Carroll responded, adding that she was in a panic during the encounter in a dressingroom. “I was fighting,” she said.
“I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not,” she said.
The exchange came as Ms Carroll underwent hours of cross-examination by Mr Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, who made it clear he was seeking to undermine her testimony about what she says was a vicious attack by Mr Trump after they ran into each other at the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue in the mid-1990s.
The lawyer pressed Ms Carroll repeatedly about basic facts, probing for inconsistencies and asking about her inability to remember precisely when in 1995 or 1996 the encounter occurred.
“I wish to heaven we could give you a date,” she replied.
Mr Tacopina had suggested in his opening statement Tuesday that TMr rump could not provide an alibi without a date.
“It all comes down to, do you believe the unbelievable?” Mr Tacopina told the jury.
At times during the cross-examination Thursday, Mr Tacopina’s approach led to admonishments from the judge, Lewis A Kaplan of US district court. “Come on, Mr Tacopina,” the judge said at one point, later repeating that the lawyer’s questions were “argumentative”.
On another occasion, judge Kaplan told Mr Tacopina: “You get to make a closing argument in this case, counsellor, and this isn’t the time for it.”
Ms Carroll sued Mr Trump in November under a new state law in New York that grants adult sexual abuse victims a one-year window to bring lawsuits against people they say abused them. Her lawsuit, filed in federal court because she and Mr Trump live in different states, asks that a jury find Mr Trump liable for battery and defamation, and award her monetary damages.
The suit also asks that Mr Trump retract what it says were defamatory statements made in October 2022 on his Truth Social platform, calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie”.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.