What fate will the jurors reserve for Donald Trump? The answer is approaching as the civil trial in New York against the former president, accused of rape and defamation by a former journalist, came to an end on Monday with a final battle between the lawyers.
After these last arguments of the two camps, long and combative, a jury of nine citizens will have to decide from this Tuesday if the former tenant of the White House must pay damages to E. Jean Carroll. She accuses him of having raped her in the spring of 1996, in a fitting room of a luxury department store in New York, Begdorf Goodman, then of having defamed her, after she had brought the first accusations in a book in 2019.
Trump claims not to remember E. John Carroll
“No one, not even a former president, is above the law”, hammered, opening her argument, the lawyer for the former columnist of the magazine She, Roberta Kaplan, in front of the six men and three women who make up the jury. “They want you to hate him enough to ignore the facts,” retorted, during a 2:30 pleading, Donald Trump’s counsel, Joe Tacopina, who again accused the complainant of having invented the story from scratch.
Donald Trump never appeared in federal court in Manhattan during the two weeks of the trial, and the jury had to be satisfied Thursday with the video of his testimony in the procedure, where he repeats not to remember E. Jean Carroll and ensures that “she is not her type”. But Roberta Kaplan recalled that the former White House tenant confused the plaintiff in a photo with his former wife, actress Marla Maples. E. Jean Carroll “was exactly his type”, assured the lawyer.
If there are no eyewitnesses who saw Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll more than 25 years ago on the shelves – deserted according to the plaintiff – of the store, two close friends of the journalist confirmed in court that she had confided to them, shortly after the alleged facts, to have been “assaulted” or “attacked” by the businessman. And two women, among those who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault in the past, also gave their testimony before the jury.
According to Me Kaplan, the former American president would have acted each time according to the same “modus operandi”, the one he himself describes in a video that has become famous, where we hear him in 2005 boasting of kissing and touch women as he pleases. Donald Trump’s lawyer conceded that his client could speak in a “crude” way about women, but “that does not make an incredible story believable”.
The legal troubles of the candidate for the White House
Pointing to inconsistencies and the absence of material evidence, he appealed to the “common sense” of the jury: if Donald Trump had attacked E. Jean Carroll, “he would have been arrested immediately”. She “never went to the police” because otherwise “they would have investigated,” he said.
Describing an outright conspiracy, the lawyer even suggested that E. Jean Carroll was inspired by an old episode of the detective series New York, Special Unit, based on a rape at Bergdorf Goodman. According to him, the former journalist wanted to sell her book better in 2019. E. Jean Carroll for her part always explained that she had not denounced the facts for fear that Donald Trump would destroy her reputation.
The jury will now have to make up its mind. Even in civil proceedings, a conviction would add to the legal troubles of the former president, a new candidate for the White House in 2024. At the beginning of April, an unprecedented event for a former American president, he was charged with criminal charges in New York for 34 accounting and tax frauds related to payments to cover up embarrassing business before the 2016 presidential election.