President Trump faced the writer E. Jean Carroll, the woman accusing him of rape, for the first time inside a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday morning. “I want to go to all of my trials,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week during the closing arguments of his civil fraud trial, another one of Mr. Trump’s six ongoing court proceedings. 

On Tuesday morning, he arrived at the federal courthouse in his motorcade, flanked by his Secret Service detail. The civil trial that began on Tuesday will determine what damages, if any, Mr. Trump must pay Ms. Carroll, a writer and former magazine columnist, for defaming her with statements he made about her in 2019.

Ms. Carroll arrived minutes later. She carried her own umbrella, a yellow one, to shield her from falling snow, the city’s first in almost two years.

“I feel good,” Ms. Carroll told the Sun at a security check. She was putting back on her stilettos that she had taken off to walk through a metal detector. Inside the courtroom, Ms. Carroll, 80 years old, and her attorneys were seated at a long table in the first row. Mr. Trump, 77, was seated steps away at the defense table. He was wearing his usual courtroom attire: dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. 

Ms. Carroll turned around in her chair and glared at Mr. Trump, while he was engaged in a conversation with his attorney and did not meet her stare. Mr. Trump has blasted the case as an “unAmerican injustice,” an “attempted EXTORTION” built on “fabricated lies and political shenanigans.”

Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump twice. The first lawsuit was stuck in complex legal maneuvering and long delayed by Mr. Trump’s appeal. Ms. Carroll filed a second lawsuit, based on New York State’s enactment of the Adult Survivors Act, in November 2022. That lawsuit went to trial before Judge Lewis Kaplan, the same judge presiding over this case, in May 2023. 

The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll inside a dressing room at an upscale Manhattan department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in 1996. Mr. Trump did not attend that trial. In statements to reporters and in social media posts, the former president fiercely denied the rape allegations, though he did not deny them in court, under oath.

Instead of rape, the jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll in 1996, and that he defamed her in October 2022 by denying their encounter ever took place, and effectively branding the journalist as a liar. The jury awarded her $5 million in combined damages for both the sexual assault and the defamation. 

On the day of the verdict, Mr. Trump went on CNN and, denying that he ever assaulted her or even knew her, called Ms. Carroll a “whack job” and claimed, “I don’t know who the hell she is.” Mr. Trump has yet to pay Ms. Carroll anything while he appeals.

Judge Kaplan ruled in July that the jury’s verdict was tantamount, in common language, to rape. While the jury disbelieved Ms. Carroll’s claim that Mr. Trump penetrated her, it believed her claim that he forced his fingers inside her against her will, Judge Kaplan ruled. 

“You must accept these facts as true,” the judge said to the 80 prospective jurors sitting in the pews, waiting to be questioned and selected. Now that the legal issues are resolved, the lawsuit Ms. Carroll brought against Mr. Trump can go forward.  

The judge explained the background story. In June 2019, Ms. Carroll published a memoir in which she recounted meeting Mr. Trump at Bergdorf Goodman, where, she says, he led her into a dressing room on the lingerie floor and raped her.

It was the first time she publicly spoke about the sexual assault, 23 years later. After the book was published, Mr. Trump, who was president at the time, made defamatory statements, such as, “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”

The sole purpose of this trial is to determine damages for these defamatory June 2019 statements. Ms. Carroll is asking for $10 million. Judge Kaplan, in his 30 years of service as a judge, has presided over several blockbuster cases, including those against Al Qaeda terrorists, mafia crime families, environmental activists, and, most recently, a fallen crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted of fraud and related crimes in November. 

Even though anonymous juries are typically reserved for high-profile criminal cases, Judge Kaplan authorized one in Mr. Trump’s civil trial in May and authorized another anonymous jury on Tuesday. The nine members were picked by both defense and the plaintiff’s attorneys Tuesday morning. 

Mr. Trump attentively watched and listened as the potential jurors answered questions and told the court about their professions, their martial statuses, where they live, and how they get their news. During the selection process, Mr. Trump turned around and observed the jury candidates, one left arm jauntily draped over his chair.

The questions had been previously provided to the judge by attorneys from both sides. “Is there anyone who feels that Mr. Trump is being treated unfairly by the court system?” Judge Kaplan asked. Mr. Trump slightly raised his right hand and half-waved from his seat at the defense table.

Judge Kaplan swatted away the protest, saying, “Well, we know where you stand.” Mr. Trump put his hand down. 

The potential jurors had been drawn from Manhattan, the Bronx, and New York City’s northern suburbs. While the city is solidly Democratic, the suburbs contain more conservatives. Three jurors agreed with Mr. Trump that he was being treated unfairly by the court system.  

When the judge asked if anyone believed the 2020 election had been stolen by Democrats, two agreed. Several jurors reported making political contributions to Mr. Trump, groups supporting him, or their opponents. Three said they could not be fair to either side. 

The attorneys finally settled on nine persons they believed to be impartial. They included a 46-year-old emergency physician, who lives at White Plains with his wife, an attorney, and who reads the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; a respiratory therapist of Westchester County whose spouse is unemployed and who watches YouTube videos for news, but much prefers watching sports; a 60-year-old train conductor of the Bronx with two children, and a German immigrant who works in the administration at a German language school at White Plains. 

After the lunch break Mr. Trump left the courthouse and headed to a rally at Atkinson, New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the attorneys embarked on their opening statements. Shawn Crowley, a lawyer for Ms. Carroll, told the court, in a soft-spoken voice, that after Ms. Carroll had come forward with her book in 2019, Mr. Trump threatened her, allegedly declaring that “she should pay dearly.”

“Donald Trump was president when he made those statements, and he used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll, humiliate her and to destroy her reputation,” Ms. Crowley continued. Mr. Trump’s comments, she stated, harmed Ms. Carroll’s reputation and “unleashed his followers … to threaten her life.”

“He sat in this courthouse this morning,” Ms. Crowley said, “and while he was sitting there he posted more defamatory statements, more lies about Ms. Carroll and this case.”

Mr. Trump had indeed gone on a social media against Ms. Carroll early Tuesday on Truth Social, reposting multiple unflattering and sexually explicit comments she made on Twitter in the mid-2010s, as well as denouncing her as “down on her luck, failing in life, nastily calling her African American husband ‘an Ape’ and her cat, ‘Vagina.’” He also accused a liberal LinkedIn billionaire, Reid Hoffman, of bankrolling her case.

“How much money will it take to make him stop?” Ms. Crowley asked, referring to this social media barrage. “For more than four years he has not stopped.”  

She explained that the damages were intended to get Mr. Trump to stop speaking against Ms. Carroll at his rallies and on social media, and that his comments unleashed attacks by his followers: “People tell Ms. Carroll that she should go to jail, that they would rape her, that she should die.”  

According to her attorney, Ms. Carroll lives every day in fear and sleeps with her father’s loaded gun next to her bed. “I hope someone really does attack, rape and murder you,” one Trump supporter is said to have written to her on May 10, 2023.

“The law protects all of us, no matter how powerful the person is who targets us,” Ms. Crowley concluded. “Donald Trump did not respect the law. He believed he could get away with it. It’s time to show him that no one is above the law.” 

Mr. Trump’s defense attorney, Alina Habba, asserted in her opening statement that Ms. Carroll’s reputation was not harmed, but instead “the evidence will show that she was thrust back into the limelight.” Thanks to Trump’s comments, the attorney said, she gained more fame than “she could ever dream of.” 

“Regardless of a few mean tweets, Ms. Carroll is now more famous than she has ever been in her life,” Ms. Habba said. She justified the “few mean tweets” as a “byproduct of the digital age,” arguing that in today’s age, “the internet always has something to say and it’s not always nice,” and that “when you put yourself out there, you get bad press.”       

She accused Ms. Carroll of being “someone who craves fame and seeks fame wherever she could get it.” She told the court that Ms. Carroll is working on a new book with Mr. Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, who wrote a bestselling book attacking her uncle. Then she showed the court a photograph of Ms. Carroll next to a liberal comedian, Kathy Griffin, who famously posed with a mock-severed head of President Trump in 2017. 

The trial is expected to last a week. It will feature, as Ms. Carroll’s evidence, the infamous “Access Hollywood”  recording of Mr. Trump boasting to the show’s then-host, Billy Bush, that women “allow” him to grab their genitals because he’s a “star.” 

Mr. Trump tried to have the contentious tape excluded from this trial, but Judge Kaplan ruled it was fair game. Because Ms. Carroll is suing for punitive damages in addition to compensatory ones, she has to prove “malice.” The video, Judge Kaplan ruled, could support a conclusion Mr. Trump defamed Ms. Carroll with malice.

“A jury reasonably could conclude that his was not ‘locker room talk.'” That instead it was “truthful bragging by Mr. Trump of his exploits.” A reasonable jury could find that “it manifested hatred of or prejudice against women,” and that it “fixed specifically on Ms. Carroll when she went public with her accusation and provoked his defamatory reaction.”

“Judge Kaplan should put this whole corrupt, Crooked Joe Biden-directed Election Interference attack on me immediately to rest,” Mr. Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. Later, on his way to the campaign rally in New Hampshire, he called the judge a “bully” who is a “disgrace.”

The former president is not required to attend this trial because it’s a civil and not a criminal case. Neither is he required to testify. But, if he does, as he has expressed he wants to, he is strictly confined in his testimony to the question of Ms. Carroll’s damages, Judge Kaplan ruled in several pre-trial orders already entered in the case. 

He can’t “introduce any evidence or argument … undermining Ms. Carroll’s account, or tending to suggest that the assault did not occur,” Judge Kaplan wrote in a January 9 order. That means, say, that Mr. Trump can’t claim he does not know Ms. Carroll, as he continuously has.

If the former president does stray from the facts in his courtroom testimony, the “court will take such measures as it finds appropriate to avoid circumvention of its rulings and of the law,” Judge Kaplan warned in a January 14 order. It is not confirmed, but likely, that Mr. Trump will take the stand on Monday, January 22. Ms. Carroll is expected to testify on Wednesday with Mr. Trump in attendance.