This week, Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president, has been in court, battling a credible allegation of rape.
For nearly 250 years of American democracy, a sentence like that would have meant the death of a presidential campaign. Sometimes it is worth taking a moment to dwell upon the obvious: Trump is running a different kind of campaign. On the night of January 15, after winning a landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses, he returned to Manhattan to attend a civil-defamation trial over the rape accusation, flying home “at the wee hours of the night,” his lawyer later told the judge, to be at the federal courthouse for the opening of jury selection. The plaintiff in the case, magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, alleges Trump sexually assaulted her three decades ago, and then defamed her by questioning her honesty, motivations, and physical attractiveness when she dared to write her story. Trump, who acts as if his Republican primary opponents are unworthy of his competition, had decided that the Carroll case would be this week’s campaign stop.
“A totally fabricated story with another Trump hating Judge,” the former president posted on his Truth Social platform on January 13. “Our legal system is TERRIBLE!!!”
Though Trump has been criminally indicted four times, the Carroll civil trial marks his first recent encounter with a jury. On the first morning of the trial, he loped into the courtroom looking weary, his signature long red tie drooping all the way down to the fly of his pants. But when the prospective jurors entered, he perked up. Trump perused lists of jury candidates during the selection process, looking on approvingly when two prospective jurors stood up to acknowledge they thought the 2020 election was stolen, and smirking sarcastically when another, a former Biden campaign volunteer, said she liked to listen to Pod Save America. (None of the three were selected.) Once the trial began, Trump took what appeared to be a very active role in his own defense, sitting at the center of his team of lawyers, with whom he frequently leaned over to confer, sometimes sending one or another up to his lead attorney, Alina Habba, with pink sticky notes. When Carroll took the witness stand, Trump leveled his beetle-browed stare at his accuser, who told her story of the alleged assault with controlled fury. He offered a running commentary of shrugs, grimaces, and stage whispers in the presence of the jury, so infuriating the Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that he threatened to throw the former president out.
Trump’s confrontational stance is strategic: What better way to show contempt than to be held in it? But his frustration with the proceedings appears genuine. In the sealed bubble of Judge Kaplan’s courtroom — where cameras, computers, and phones are banned — Trump has finally encountered an environment he cannot control. He can’t even argue his innocence. A jury in a civil trial last year, which Trump chose not to attend, found in Carroll’s favor when it came to her claim of sexual assault. This second trial is about tallying up damages for defamatory attacks Trump lobbed at Carroll from the White House. Judge Kaplan, citing the earlier verdict, has ruled that the truth has been “conclusively established” that Trump “sexually abused — indeed, raped” Carroll, and then smeared her by questioning her credibility. Trump can protest all he wants in the outside world, but inside court, in the eyes of the law, he is guilty.
“I’m here because Donald Trump assaulted me, and I wrote about it; he lied and he said it never happened,” Carroll said as she opened her testimony. “He shattered my reputation.”
At the defense table, Trump shook his head.
“I’m here to get my reputation back,” Carroll said, “and to get him to stop lying about me.”
Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan — who is not related to the judge — led her through the facts of the case. Carroll told the jury about her unusual journalism career, which had begun at Indiana University, where she was a cheerleader and competed in beauty pageants while writing on the side. She said she spent “the next two decades in a blizzard of negativity and rejection,” sending off pitches into the void, until one day an editor at Esquire rescued one of her stories off the slush pile and gave her a career. Carroll moved to Manhattan. During the 1980s, she took assignments for magazines including Rolling Stone, published books of essays, and worked in the writers’ room for a season on Saturday Night Live. She married a television anchor and dined at Elaine’s. She started to write a monthly advice column for Elle called “Ask E. Jean” where she urged people — women, mostly — writing in with their problems, to take charge of their lives. “I was like, ‘Come on, get up, stop blubbering,’” Carroll testified.
At the height of her career, in the mid-1990s, Carroll was making around $400,000 a year. The former Nixon aide Roger Ailes asked her to do an advice show on a new cable-television news network that he was starting up, which eventually turned into MSNBC. She was a recognizable public figure. So she wasn’t surprised when, one day sometime around 1996 — she’s foggy on the exact date — Trump recognized her as she was leaving Bergdorf Goodman. They had met before, but they didn’t really know one another, but everyone in New York knew Trump. Carroll claims he chatted her up, charmed her, and lured her to a deserted floor of the store, where he threw her against the wall of a dressing room, kissed her, and jammed his finger into her vagina. (Carroll claims he also penetrated her with his penis, which is necessary for a criminal rape charge in New York, but the jury in the first trial failed to reach a verdict on that issue, finding only that Trump was liable for sexual abuse. Kaplan has ruled, however, that “Mr. Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law.”) After the alleged attack, Carroll confided in two friends: Lisa Birnbach, then a writer for New York, and Carol Martin, a TV news anchor, who gave her conflicting advice about whether to report the attack to the police. Carroll decided to avoid an uproar, and moved on.
In 2016, according to her defamation complaint, Carroll “watched in horror” as multiple women came forward with similar stories of assault by Trump. In the Access Hollywood tape, he was caught saying out loud that if you were a celebrity, you could just “grab ’em by the pussy,” which was a literal description of what she recalled about their encounter. But Carroll’s mother was dying, and she did not want to turn her last days into a political circus, so she continued to keep her account to herself. But in 2018, Carroll testified, her $120,000-a-year contract at Elle was cut in half. She had already started working on a book about the experiences of everyday women, inspired in part by the Harvey Weinstein rape cases, titled What Do We Need Men For? As she did her interviews, Carroll testified, “I was overwhelmed with the honesty of these women.” Shamed by her own silence, she said she thought, “I’m such a hypocrite.”
Trump’s defense team has tried to make the case that Carroll’s career was on a downward trajectory, and she knew exactly what she was getting into by accusing the president, who had a proven capacity to sell books. “She has gained more fame, more notoriety, than she could ever dream of,” Habba, Trump’s lead attorney, said in her opening argument to the jury. In June 2019, an excerpt from the forthcoming book was published in New York. Carroll posed for the magazine cover, wearing the same dress she said she was wearing the day of the attack. (I had no role in the publication of the article. New York editor-in-chief David Haskell was named in a court filing as a potential trial witness, but he has not been called to testify.) The article, which included a terse denial from the White House, was published online on Friday, June 21.
Within hours, Trump began to attack Carroll. “I’ve never met this person in my life,” he claimed in an official statement released by the White House on June 21. “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.” A day later, as he walked to his presidential helicopter, Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the article. “This is a woman who has accused other men of things,” Trump said. “It is a totally false accusation.” He called New York “a failing magazine” that was “ready to go out of business” and said that there were “numerous cases where women were paid money” to accuse him.
“You know, people have to be careful,” Trump said, “because they’re playing with very dangerous territory.”
On June 24, Trump said Carroll was “totally lying” in an Oval Office interview with The Hill. “Number one, she’s not my type,” the president claimed. “Number two, it never happened.”
Carroll now lives in upstate New York, in a cabin in the mountains, but after the article published she did a number of TV news interviews, and she was staying in a hotel in Manhattan. She testified that she went to her computer to see the reaction to her story on Twitter. She was hit by what she described as a “wave of slime,” comments echoing the attacks of the president. “You lying slut, you lying whore,” Carroll said. She testified that she opened the public email account that she used to solicit questions for her advice column, and saw vile photos and death threats. She testified that she panicked, and immediately tried to close the curtains on her windows, even though she knew it was irrational. “My brain reacts like it is going to happen right now,” Carroll said. She said she immediately deleted the threatening emails, a practice she continued.
“I just delete, delete, delete,” Carroll said. “It really helped me to get control of the situation.”
Hearing this, Trump put his forehead on the table, pantomiming his disbelief. Later, during Carroll’s cross-examination, he appeared to confer with one of his lawyers, who handed Habba a pink sticky note. She glanced at it and asked: “Ms. Carroll, are you aware that it is illegal to delete evidence after a subpoena is issued?” The defense then moved for a mistrial, which Kaplan denied.
The plaintiffs produced plenty of other evidence, however, of online abuse. “You have to answer to the LORD for your lies,” someone messaged her on Facebook, within an hour of Trump’s first statement. Another email called her a “demented, lying old hag.”
“Hi E. Jean Carroll,” a Facebook user with a woman’s name messaged her on June 22. “I want to tell you that you are a lying bitch. Believe Trump. Why would he want to rape you when you are so frickin’ ugly? Go get a life and leave President Trump alone.”
“To have the president of the United States, one of the most powerful persons on Earth … calling me a liar 26 times — I counted them — it ended the world that I had been living in,” Carroll testified. “I had left the world of facts — a lovely world — and I was living in a new universe.”
To make matters worse, Carroll said, her publicity plan had backfired. Interviewers only wanted to talk to her about Trump, not her book. She told them she felt “buoyant,” “carefree,” and enveloped in a “cocoon of love and support.” In fact, she said, that was just her character talking — the chipper public E. Jean. Media coverage of the rape allegation died down after a few days, as the press moved on to the next Trump outrage. The book “was a dud,” Carroll testified. But at a party, she met George Conway, the lawyer and Trump critic who was then frostily married to White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. He suggested an alternative route to holding Trump accountable: suing him for defamation over his denials.
Because Trump was president, he could claim he had legal immunity from civil lawsuits, which tied the suit up in appeals courts for the rest of his term. But in 2022, after he was out of office, he was deposed at Mar-a-Lago. The session went poorly for him. He defended what he said on the Access Hollywood tape. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s largely been true.” He insulted the appearance of Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan. When shown evidence that he did, in fact, know his accuser — a photo that had appeared with Carroll’s article, showing her, Trump, and their spouses engaged in conversation — the former president said, “that’s Marla,” mistaking Carroll for Marla Maples, his second wife.
“I take it that the three women you’ve married are all your type,” Roberta Kaplan asked.
“Yeah,” Trump replied.
A few days before the deposition, Trump had released a statement on Truth Social, calling Carroll’s lawsuit a “con job” and a “scam” meant to promote a “really crummy book.” She filed a second lawsuit, alleging defamation for the 2022 statement as well as a battery claim enabled by a new state law that temporarily waived the statute of limitations for sexual-assault claims. The second case, unencumbered by the first one’s legal issues involving presidential immunity from civil lawsuits, moved faster to trial. Carroll’s lawyers in the current trial have shown that, even after a jury found him liable and awarded her $5 million in damages, Trump continued to use his social-media platform to malign his accuser.
The plaintiffs have presented a raft of messages that Carroll received around the time of the verdict. Plaintiff’s exhibit 132: “Do yourself a favor you filthy whore and stick a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger and send yourself to HELL.” Exhibit 126: “I hope someone really does attack, rape and murder you,” wrote another. Exhibit 124: “I will rape u e jean carroll.”
Carroll testified that she worried that someone might actually make good on these threats. She let her pit bull run off the leash on her rural property. She bought bullets for a rifle she had inherited from her father, and kept it by her bed. Safety fears in her case have extended to the jury, too. The names of its members, seven men and two women, are not known to either side. They are being transported from assembly points via bus to the courthouse, where they are brought in through a secure parking garage. Judge Kaplan suggested in his opening instructions that they might consider referring to one another by aliases to preserve their anonymity.
Nonetheless, Trump’s attorneys have argued that Carroll is exaggerating the threats, and that in any case, they are unconnected to anything their client said in his defense. “She wants President Trump to pay for mean tweets,” Habba said in her opening. She argued that Carroll had “served as the catalyst herself for the purported harm,” by seeking publicity. “She doesn’t want to fix her reputation, ladies and gentlemen,” Habba said. “She likes her new brand.”
Throughout the trial, Trump has continued to repeat the same messages that got him sued for defamation in the first place. “It was all made up,” Trump said in an Iowa campaign speech that the plaintiff’s attorneys showed to the jury. “I have no idea who this woman is,” he said in a press conference he held at his building 40 Wall Street last week, after the conclusion of his last trial, a civil-fraud case in New York state court. “It’s ridiculous.” In the plaintiff’s opening argument on Monday, Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley told the jury that Trump had posted about Carroll 22 times on Truth Social that very morning. “Think about that,” she said, alluding to the possibility of punitive damages. “Think about that when you consider what it will take to get him to stop.”
Trump is not acting like someone who is concerned about a monetary judgment. Even before the trial began, he attacked Judge Kaplan, a Democratic appointee, calling him “terrible, biased irrationally angry.” He is speaking to his voters, seeking to nullify the persuasive power of the law. Throughout the proceedings, Trump is accompanied by a cluster of aides — including his valet Walt Nauta, a co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case, and Boris Epshteyn, an attorney and political adviser — who shuttle in and out of the courtroom, presumably to deliver messages to Trump’s supporters in the outside world. Judge Kaplan, a famously stern disciplinarian, has been withering in his responses to Habba’s efforts to push the boundaries in introducing evidence contrary to the first jury’s verdict. He has been similarly dismissive of Trump’s complaints that the trial was interfering with ability to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.
On Tuesday morning, Habba told Judge Kaplan that his refusal to delay the trial so Trump could attend the funeral was “insanely prejudicial.” He cut her off and instructed her to “sit down.”
“I don’t like being spoken to like that, your honor,” she said in reply.
Trump shook his head, and said something that sounded like “nasty guy.” (He would repeat the same thing about Judge Kaplan during a press conference at 40 Wall Street.)
Later in the day, after the jury had left the courtroom for lunch, Crowley complained about Trump’s comments on Carroll’s testimony (“con job,” “witch hunt”) and his own video clips attacking her, which were played by the plaintiffs (“It’s true!”). Crowley said she could hear them, and presumably so could the jurors, Kaplan reprimanded the defendant. “Mr. Trump has a right to be present here. That right can be forfeited if he is disruptive. Mr. Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial. I understand you’re probably very eager for me to do that.”
“I would love it,” Trump said, throwing up his hands. “I would love it.”
“I know you would,” the judge said. “You just can’t control yourself in these circumstances, apparently.”
“You can’t either,” Trump retorted.
The room settled down, the jury returned, and Carroll resumed her testimony. Roberta Kaplan displayed another piece of evidence, a video clip of a CNN town-hall interview that Trump did the day after the verdict in the first Carroll trial. He once again said he had “no idea who the hell she is,” and derided her and her story of “hanky-panky.” The Trump-friendly audience hooted.
“He was doing it to a large crowd and drawing laughs about sexual assault,” Carroll testified. “I felt worthless.”
The CNN moderator, Kaitlan Collins, had started by asking Trump, “What do you say to voters who say it disqualifies you from being president?”
“Well, there weren’t too many of them because my poll numbers just came out,” Trump replied. “They went up, okay?”
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