It was almost over before it started. Three questions, less than five minutes: Donald Trump defended himself Thursday in the defamation trial filed in New York by the author E. Jean Carroll, but his freedom of speech was strictly limited by the judge, to avoid any verbal slippage afterwards several deviations. Before the jury arrived, he muttered, gesticulating: “I have never met this woman, I don’t know who this woman is.” “Mr. Trump, lower your voice,” the judge warned.
In a heavy atmosphere, facing the nine jurors and his accuser, who had accused him of rape and had him convicted in civil court in 2023 for sexual assault, the former President of the United States was only authorized to to yes or no answers to the three questions asked by his lawyer Alina Habba.
The big favorite in the Republican primary for the 2024 presidential election was simply able to confirm, “100%”, his testimony during the procedure. And he indicated with a “yes” that he had made the comments targeted by the complaint, in June 2019, to defend himself from the accusations of rape that had just been made, for the first time publicly, by E. Jean Carroll in a book . “She said something that I considered to be false,” he tried to elaborate, before Judge Lewis Kaplan immediately cut him off: “The jury will ignore everything after ‘yes’”
“This is not America”
Did he intend to hurt Carroll by making these statements? “No, I just wanted to defend myself, my family, and frankly, the presidency as well. » Same punishment from Judge Kaplan: “The jury will not consider anything after ‘no’”.
The cross-examination of E’s lawyer. Jean Carroll was even shorter: Donald Trump simply indicated that he had not attended his first trial which established his responsibility in the sexual assault of his accuser.
Wednesday evening, on his Truth Social platform, the ex-president launched no less than 37 written attacks against E. Jean Carroll, whom he has continued to denigrate and insult for months by calling her “crazy”, to the “phony story”, which he has “never seen in (his) life”. “She is sick,” he repeated during his testimony in the proceedings in October 2022, which the jurors were able to view during the morning.
Visibly frustrated and furious, Donald Trump, 77, shook his head in annoyance as he testified. “This is not America,” he said as he left the courtroom in Manhattan federal court.
Amount of damages to be established
Since January 16, the civil trial has pitted E. Jean Carroll, 80 years old and former columnist for the American edition of Elle magazine, against the former President of the United States.
The author has already had her sentenced in civil court in May 2023 to five million dollars in compensation for sexual assault in a fitting room of a New York department store in 1996 and already a first time for defamation for comments held in 2022, a verdict rendered unanimously by a popular jury.
But she had already filed a complaint for defamation in 2019, when Donald Trump, to deny rape accusations, claimed that she had invented everything to “sell a new book”. The procedure had been delayed but this second trial was maintained and E. Jean Carroll is claiming more than 10 million dollars for moral and professional damage.
Judge Kaplan, who presided over the first trial, ordered that the second should focus only on Donald Trump’s comments and not on E.’s rape accusations. John Carroll. The proceedings are due to end on Friday with final arguments, before the jury retires to deliberate.