Trump faces civil trial for rape accusation and defamation by E. Jean Carroll

three weeks after Donald Trump would become the first former president of the United States to be indicted for criminal charges in the history of the country, and the same day that Joe Biden has announced that he will seek re-election in 2024, opened this Tuesday in New York another of the legal nightmares for the Republican, who aspires to compete again with Biden to occupy the Oval Office. In a manhattan federal court started with the selection of six men and three women for a jury he civil trial that Trump faces for the rape accusation and defamation that you have filed against him E. Jean Carrolla former columnist for ‘Elle’ magazine who claims she was sexually assaulted in the mid-1990s by the then-real-estate businessman in a Bergdoff Goodman fitting room.

Carroll, now 79, publicly denounced Trump’s attack for the first time in a book in 2019 and then filed a defamation lawsuit, after the then president rejected his accusations and said of the woman: “not my type”. When the governor of New York last year signed the Adult Survivors Actwhich removed some time limitations on reporting old sexual assaults and gave them a year to file lawsuits, Carroll raised the first day it was possible which now comes to trial.

The accusation

According to one of the court documents, Carroll and Trump, who knew each other from shared social circles in New York, met at the store and he asked her to help buy a gift for “a girl.” She accompanied him to the lingerie section. At one point she ended up in a fitting roomwhere he went and “He forced her against a wall, pinned her down with his shoulder, and raped her.”. According to the complaint, she “pulled down his stockings, moved her fingers over Carroll’s genitals and he entered by force with his penis.” The alleged attack happened in the spring of 1996 and lasted two or three minutes.

He Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the case, has rejected several attempts by Trump’s defense to dismiss the case and postpone it. The magistrate, who has led proceedings against the mafia and who handed down a life sentence against an Al Qaeda operative, also gave the green light in the preliminary phase for the use of the 2005 video that reappeared months before the 2016 presidential election in which Trump boasted that fame allowed him to do whatever he wanted with women, including “take them by the pussy”. 26 womenincluding Carroll, have publicly denounced Trump for inappropriate sexual conduct.

At least three of these women will be summoned to testify by Carroll’s lawyers, who this Tuesday attended the start of a trial in New York that is expected to last between five and ten days and where the plaintiff seeks a economic compensation. They will be Carroll herself; the businesswoman Jessica Leeds, which claims that in 1979 Trump groped him on the chest on a first-class flight; and the journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who says that he cornered him in 2005 in a room in Mar-a-Lago, where he had gone to interview Trump and his wife Melania, and pushed him against the wall and kissed him against his will.

trump, absent

Trump does not need to be present at the trial and he is not expected to be called to testify by Carroll’s lawyers, although he may decide to testify in his own defense. The plaintiff’s lawyers could use in the process the deposition that the former president made in October in the instruction, a statement in which, among other things, Trump mistook the former columnist for his first wife, Marla Maples, when shown a photograph.

The former president’s defense, meanwhile, will try to undermine Carroll’s credibility, putting one of its focuses on his failure to report it until 2019. Carroll assures that he told two friends and that one of them recommended that he not speak publicly. She is scheduled to both testify as well.

The jury does not have to find Trump guilty or innocent, just determine if you are responsible of damages to Carroll for assault and defamation under New York law. If they determine that responsibility, they will also establish if it should be financially compensated and with what amount.