Donald Trump rape trial opens with secret jury, judge’s warning
- The six men and nine women deciding the ex-president’s fate in E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit could use fake names when talking to each other, the judge suggested
- He also warned Trump and Carroll’s lawyers to tell their clients and witnesses not to make statements that could ‘incite violence or civil unrest’
A former advice columnist’s nearly 30-year-old rape claim against Donald Trump went to trial on Tuesday as jurors in the federal civil case heard her allegation of being attacked in a luxury department store dressing room. The former president says nothing happened between them.
E. Jean Carroll will testify that what unfolded in a few minutes in a fitting room in 1996 “would change her life forever”, one of her lawyers, Shawn Crowley, said in an opening statement.
“Filled with fear and shame, she kept silent for decades. Eventually, though, silence became impossible,” Crowley said. And when Carroll broke that silence in a 2019 memoir, the then-president “used the most powerful platform on Earth to lie about what he had done, attack Ms Carroll’s integrity and insult her appearance”.
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina painted her story as wildly implausible and short of evidence, and described it as “an affront to justice”. He accused her of pursuing the case for money, status and political reasons.
“It all comes down to: do you believe the unbelievable?” Tacopina told the six-man, three-woman jury. He urged the panel in heavily Democratic New York to put politics aside in weighing the case against the Republican ex-president and ex-New Yorker.