E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuit Wraps Up With Jury Deliberations Due To Begin on Tuesday

Jury deliberations will begin on Tuesday in Carroll v. Trump, the civil battery and defamation lawsuit brought by a former magazine columnist and author, E. Jean Carroll, against President Trump that claims Mr. Trump raped her in a department store changing room in the 1990s. During the closing arguments in Manhattan on Monday, Ms. Carroll’s lawyers argued that the alleged assault is part of a decades-long pattern by the former president — assaulting women, defaming them when he is publicly accused, and disparaging their physical appearances and motivations. Mr. Trump’s legal team pointed out several inconsistencies and lapsed periods of memory as justification for the jury to rule against his accuser. One of Ms. Carroll’s attorneys, Shawn Crowley, asserted that Mr. Trump’s pattern of harassing and assaulting women is consistent and well-documented. “Start with a friendly encounter in a semi-public place,” Ms. Crowley said. “All of a sudden: Pounce, kiss, grab, grope. Don’t wait. And when they speak up about what happened, attack,” she added. “Humiliate them. Call them liars. Call them too ugly to assault.”Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit has largely depended on testimony from other women who claim to have been the object of groping and unwanted kissing by Mr. Trump many years ago. On May 2, a woman named Jessica Leeds told her story to the jury, claiming that the former president groped her on a plane in the late 1970s after she was invited to sit in first class. “He was trying to kiss me and trying to pull me,” Ms. Leeds said of Mr. Trump. “He was grabbing my breasts. It’s like he had 40 zillion hands.”Another woman, journalist Natasha Stoyonoff, testified that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her at his Mar-a-Lago estate in late 2005 when she was writing a profile of the future president and his new wife, Melania, for People magazine. Ms. Stoyonoff claimed that Mr. Trump was giving her a private tour of his Florida estate as his wife was getting dressed for the interview. She said that he took her to an empty room and shut the door behind her. “He was against me and just holding my shoulders back,” Ms. Stoyonoff said. “I didn’t say words. I couldn’t. I tried. I mean, I was just flustered and sort of shocked and I — no words came out of me. I tried, though. I remember just sort of mumbling.”Because Ms. Carroll never filed a police report or told many people about the alleged incident at the time, questions about her credibility and motive for bringing the suit now have been aggressively asked by Mr. Trump’s legal team. The former president’s lead attorney, Joseph Tacopina, said Ms. Carroll accused Mr. Trump of rape in her 2019 memoir and brought this suit for “money, status, political reasons.”Earlier in the trial, Ms. Carroll testified that she attended a party alongside so-called anti-Trump resistance stars before she filed her lawsuit, raising speculation that some high-profile detractors of Mr. Trump pushed her into suing. During a 2019 party at the Manhattan home of a liberal writer, Molly Jong-Fast, Ms. Carroll met the left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin and an anti-Trump conservative lawyer, George Conway, the estranged husband of Mr. Trump’s chief strategist. When asked in court if her dinner with those fiercely anti-Trump celebrities affected her decision to sue, Ms. Carroll said that Mr. Conway’s advice “crystallized” her final move to file the lawsuit. During his closing argument, Mr. Tacopina said that Mr. Conway “got his hooks into Ms. Carroll” and pushed her to sue out of pure disdain for the former president. Interestingly, Mr. Conway was instrumental some 25 years ago in keeping alive Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton. The suit would eventually ensnare Mr. Clinton into a deposition in which he lied about his sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky.The presiding judge in the Carroll case, Lewis Kaplan — who is not related to Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan — told both parties early in the trial to refrain from making inflammatory public statements “that will incite violence or civil unrest.”Throughout the trial, the former president had remained uncharacteristically quiet. During other legal tribulations — whether it be his first impeachment in 2019, the criminal case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, or the fraud lawsuit filed by the New York state attorney general’s office — he often took to social media to decry those who were going after him. In a surprising twist as the trial came to a close, Mr. Trump on Thursday claimed he would “probably” return to Manhattan in order to “confront” his accusers despite previously saying he would not attend the trial. Mr. Tacopina had told the court in no uncertain terms that his client would not testify or appear in court at all. Judge Kaplan did offer the former president the opportunity to submit a motion to testify by Sunday at 5 p.m., but that ultimately did not happen.The only time the jury has heard from the former president was through a video of a deposition he gave in 2022. “If it did happen, it would have been reported within minutes,” Mr. Trump said of the alleged assault. He also said that someone at Bergdorf Goodman, a “very busy store,” would have heard or seen something if the assault had happened. “It’s the most ridiculous, disgusting story. It’s just made up,” the former president said in the video. During closing arguments, Mr. Tacopina explained why the former president refused to put up any defense or call any witnesses — because it is a “made up” story that occurred on an unknown date, it would be impossible for Mr. Trump to prove that he did not actually assault Ms. Carroll.

E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuit Wraps Up With Jury Deliberations Due To Begin on Tuesday

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