Trump rape trial: E. Jean Carroll testifies

E. Jean Carroll, the author who accuses former President Donald Trump of raping her in a Latest York department store within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, began testifying at a civil trial for her lawsuit on Wednesday.

“I’m here because Trump raped me,” Carroll testified. “He lied and shattered my repute and I’m attempting to get my life back.”

Carroll took the witness stand in Manhattan federal court after the judge within the case warned Trump’s lawyer in regards to the former president’s recent social media posts, which attacked Carroll’s credibility.

Trump’s posts mentioned two issues that Judge Lewis Kaplan had warned parties within the trial not to say to jurors.

Considered one of those issues was whether a dress Carroll said she saved from the day she claims Trump assaulted her accommodates DNA material that may very well be linked to him, or rule him out because the source of that genetic material. Carroll alleges Trump assaulted her in a dressing room on the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in or around 1996.

The opposite has to do together with her lawsuit against Trump being funded partly by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and a significant Democratic donor, and whether Trump’s lawyers will probably be allowed to argue to jurors that Carroll and her attorneys hid that fact for months.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan told Judge Kaplan, who shouldn’t be related to her, in regards to the posts before the primary witness took the stand within the case.

Judge Kaplan suggested to Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina that the previous president could risk being sued or having sanctions imposed for the Truth Social posts he issued Wednesday morning.

“We’re entering into in area during which your client could face a recent liability and I feel what I mean,” Kaplan said.

Trump, who’s searching for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has not appeared within the courtroom since jury selection began Tuesday. It shouldn’t be clear that he’ll attend the trial on any day.

The previous president denies raping Carroll. He also argues he didn’t defame her in comments he made last fall, when he said her claim was a hoax, and that she had modified her account of the alleged attack during an interview with CNN.

In his first Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump wrote, “The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM. Her lawyer is a political operative, financed by an enormous political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that.”

“Just take a look at her CNN interview before & after the industrial break – Like a special person,” Trump wrote, referring to an interview Carroll gave CNN in regards to the lawsuit.

He continued: “She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky “stuff”, then she didn’t want to supply it. The dress must be allowed to be a part of the case. This can be a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!”

Trump wrote a second post echoing those themes, and wrote “Does anybody imagine that I’d take a then almost 60 yr old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a really crowded department store, (with me being very well-known, to place it mildly!), right into a tiny dressing room, and …. her. She didn’t scream? There aren’t any witnesses? No person saw this?”

When Judge Kaplan told Tacopina that Trump was chatting with the general public about issues he was not alleged to discuss, the attorney accused Carroll’s lawyers of leaking to the media that two mock juries they held for the case had ruled that Trump was civilly responsible for raping and defaming her, in line with tweets from reporters in court.

Kaplan noted that somebody who had participated within the mock juries could have leaked that information.

Kaplan also said that Trump “refused to get DNA sample and now he wants it within the case?”

Tacopina then said he would speak to Trump later Wednesday in regards to the posts, and would ask the previous president to not comment on the case, in line with the journalists’ tweets.

Also Wednesday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office asked the state court judge in a criminal case against Trump to bar him from publicly using among the evidence in that case.

Trump is accused of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment his then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to the porn star Stormy Daniels to maintain her quiet about an alleged tryst with Trump.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case, and denies having sex with Daniels.

“Donald J. Trump has a longstanding and maybe singular history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, trial jurors, grand jurors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him, putting those individuals and their families at considerable safety risk,” wrote assistant district attorney Catherine McCaw in her motion.