Trump Rape Lawsuit: With Closing Arguments Complete, the Jury is Next in Trump Rape Trial (Published 2023) (2024)

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Jury must now decide if it believes Carroll or Trump in rape trial

“He just decided not to be here,” the lawyer, Michael J. Ferrara, told the jury on Monday. “He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll.”

He added, “You should draw the conclusion that that’s because he did it.”

But Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said that there was no reason for his client to appear in court. The rape allegation, he said, was a complete invention.

Mr. Tacopina took an uncompromising line during the two-week civil trial in Manhattan federal court, the first time that Mr. Trump, 76, who has faced years of allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with women, has had to answer such a claim at trial.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer argued that his client was never even in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room where Ms. Carroll said he attacked her one evening in 1996. Ms. Carroll, 79, and the witnesses she called to corroborate her account had simply made up the story, Mr. Tacopina argued, and so had other witnesses at the trial who said under oath that they, too, had been sexually attacked by Mr. Trump.

“Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable,” Mr. Tacopina said. “Everything in this case is one of those things.”

On Tuesday, the jurors are to begin deliberations after the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, instructs them on the law. Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit, brought under a New York law that provides a one-year window for sexual abuse victims to sue, seeks damages for battery and defamation: Mr. Trump on his Truth Social website had called Ms. Carroll’s case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”

The trial comes as Mr. Trump faces a barrage of legal actions related to his political and business activities, including federal and state investigations, criminal charges filed by the Manhattan district attorney and a lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general.

In Ms. Carroll’s civil suit, the standard of proof is different from that of a criminal case: The jury must decide whether her lawyers have proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump committed battery.

As closing arguments began Monday morning, Roberta A. Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lead lawyer, took the jury through the evidence, Ms. Carroll’s testimony and witnesses’ statements that she said supported it.

Two of Ms. Carroll’s friends — Lisa Birnbach, an author and journalist, and Carol Martin, a former TV anchor — each had testified that almost immediately after the encounter at Bergdorf Goodman, she had told them Mr. Trump had attacked her.

Two other women testified that they were assaulted by Mr. Trump in much the same way. Jessica Leeds, a former stockbroker, testified that Mr. Trump had groped her and kissed her without her consent in the 1970s. Natasha Stoynoff, a former writer for People magazine, said that during an interview, Mr. Trump lured her into a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate, pushed her against a wall and kissed her without her consent.

Ms. Kaplan said the defense’s position that Ms. Carroll and her witnesses were all lying was preposterous. “Donald Trump’s defense here is essentially that there is a vast conspiracy against him,” she said.

Ms. Kaplan compared the way her client had appeared during the trial — a “courageous” woman who answered questions “calmly and patiently” — to Mr. Trump’s behavior in a videotaped deposition shown to the jury.

In it, Mr. Trump had said he could not have raped Ms. Carroll because she was not his “type.” But Ms. Kaplan noted in court that when she showed him a photograph of Ms. Carroll greeting him at a function in the 1980s, he misidentified her as Marla Maples, his second wife.

“The truth is that E. Jean Carroll, a former cheerleader and Miss Indiana, was exactly Donald Trump’s type,” she said.

Ms. Kaplan said the experience of Ms. Leeds and Ms. Stoynoff showed a pattern: “Trump followed this same playbook when he attacked Ms. Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman.”

She also noted Mr. Trump’s response when she asked him at his deposition about the “Access Hollywood” recording, which became public in 2016. In it, he bragged about grabbing women by their genitals and said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

In the deposition, Mr. Trump did not repudiate his comment. “Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he said, adding that he considered himself one.

Ms. Kaplan told the jury: “He thinks stars like him can get away with it. He thinks he can get away with it here.”

She added: “Much of what Donald Trump says actually supports our side of the case. In a very real sense, Donald Trump here is a witness against himself.”

For his part, Mr. Tacopina said Mr. Trump was not a man in need of witnesses.

“Donald Trump doesn’t have a story to tell here, other than to say it’s a lie,” Mr. Tacopina said in his summation. He questioned who might even be appropriate to call to the witness stand, asking, “How do you prove a negative?”

He called Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit a “scam” and said that she had brought her false claim “for, amongst other things, money, status, political reasons.”

Mr. Tacopina then proceeded, over more than two hours, to challenge not only Ms. Carroll’s testimony but also that of nearly every other witness who took the stand in her case.

He pointed out how Ms. Carroll could not recall a date for the supposed assault and how she had come up with a new detail — testifying that the attack must have occurred on a Thursday because Bergdorf’s was open late on that day.

“She tailored her testimony right in front of you,” Mr. Tacopina said.

He rejected Ms. Kaplan’s argument that Mr. Trump’s comments in the “Access Hollywood” tape showed he was a predator.

“He talked that way, he said that, but that doesn’t make Ms. Carroll’s unbelievable story believable,” Mr. Tacopina said.

During the course of the trial, Mr. Tacopina, in his cross-examination of Ms. Carroll, probed for inconsistencies in her story and gaps in her memory and noted that in her testimony, she said that she did not scream during the attack.

In rebuttal, Mr. Ferrara told the jurors Monday that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had an idea of the “perfect rape victim” — one who never laughs again, never tries to hold their rapist accountable, never gets their day in court. “The perfect rape victim screams,” he said.

“That’s the defense’s out-of-date, out-of-touch view,” Mr. Ferrara said. “It is as wrong as it is offensive.”

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“You know from the evidence in this case it is definitely not locker room talk when Donald Trump does it,” Ferrara continues, and points to the three women who have testified in this case that the former president attacked him: Carroll, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff.

Ferrara continues that Trump didn’t come into the courtroom and didn’t take the witness stand. “You should draw the conclusion that's because he did it,” Ferrara said.

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He reminds the jury that Tacopina asked Carroll about whether she willingly went into the dressing room first, whether she laughed and whether she screamed.

“When America voted for Donald Trump, we all knew how he treated women,” Ferrara said. “America voted for him anyway.’

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In closing argument, Trump’s lawyer posits a conspiracy among a group of women.

“If something is completely made up, the only way to defend yourself against that accusation is by challenging the people who made it up and the story itself,” Mr. Tacopina said.

That’s exactly what Mr. Tacopina did for more than two hours. He challenged Ms. Carroll’s testimony, arguing that many details were hard to believe. He said that Dr. Leslie Lebowitz, a trauma expert who testified, was not credible and was instead an “excuse machine” hired to “explain away all of the unexplainable.”

Mr. Tacopina said that two friends who testified to corroborate Ms. Carroll’s story, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin, had schemed with Ms. Carroll. Mr. Tacopina focused on their political affiliations and how much they hated Mr. Trump.

Both women said in court that Ms. Carroll told them about the encounter with Mr. Trump shortly after it happened and how Ms. Carroll forbade them from speaking of it again.

Mr. Tacopina said there was “no plausible explanation at all for why they didn’t talk amongst themselves even once before the book, except for the obvious: The book was made up.”

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Tacopina touched on most aspects of Roberta Kaplan’s closing argument on Carroll's behalf. Notably absent: any mention of Trump confusing Ms. Carroll with his ex-wife, Marla Maples, when looking at the picture during the deposition.

As Trump's lawyer ends his closing argument, he says, “I ask you all to please, to please have the courage to do what is right here.”

Joseph Tacopina also says that the prominent anti-Trump lawyer George Conway “got his hooks into Ms. Carroll” and persuaded her to file a lawsuit against his client.

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Who are the lawyers representing Donald Trump?

Mr. Tacopina, the son of Italian immigrants, graduated from Poly Prep High School in Brooklyn and Skidmore College. He decided to pursue law at the University of Bridgeport after reading “Fatal Vision,” a book about an Army doctor who killed his wife and two children.

He has extensive experience representing high-profile clients in New York’s state and federal courts. Mr. Tacopina’s first major case was defending one of the “Morgue Boys,” a group of police officers who were charged with robbing Brooklyn residents and drug dealers; they were acquitted in 1995.

Mr. Tacopina has also been on both sides of rape litigation: He represented a police officer who was accused of raping a drunk woman and represented a woman who accused two New Jersey Transit Police Department officers of attacking her.

“I believed in both cases I was on the side of justice,” Mr. Tacopina told The New York Times in 2011.

His other clients have included Michael Jackson, Sean Hannity and the rapper A$AP Rocky.

Ms. Habba also has experience with rape cases. She represented plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a Connecticut municipality for the rape of children by a town employee over the course of several decades.

She began working for Mr. Trump in 2021, when she filed a lawsuit against The New York Times, three of the newspaper’s reporters and Mr. Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump. That case is still pending.

Ms. Habba also filed a lawsuit on Mr. Trump’s behalf against nearly three dozen of his political adversaries. A federal judge in Florida ruled in January that Mr. Trump and Ms. Habba had to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

She is also representing Mr. Trump in the lawsuit filed against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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He goes on to say that she never made a police report decades ago because the attack “never happened.”

The defense attacked Carroll’s credibility, suggesting she had motives to lie.

Mr. Tacopina sought to elicit testimony that suggested to the jury that Ms. Carroll had motives to make up her allegation, including politics, money and fame.

He used his cross-examination to make her story seem implausible. He focused on Ms. Carroll’s inability to remember the date she said the attack occurred. He asked how she managed to push Mr. Trump away from her with her knee even though she said he had pulled down her tights. He also asked how she could have possibly held onto her purse the whole time as she claimed, and he questioned why she had not gone to the police afterward.

Mr. Tacopina also repeatedly asked Ms. Carroll why she had not screamed during the encounter.

“Even though you understood you were in the middle of this supposed battle, you never screamed at Donald Trump or screamed for help?” Mr. Tacopina asked during the first day of his cross-examination.

“I’m not a screamer,” Ms. Carroll replied.

Later in his questioning, Mr. Tacopina asked her again whether she had screamed, and Ms. Carroll appeared to be visibly irritated.

“I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not,” Ms. Carroll said, raising her voice.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyers objected to many of Mr. Tacopina’s questions, arguing that they were repetitive and “argumentative.” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court ruled in favor of many of those objections.

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Roberta Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, went to great lengths to explain why Carroll did not know the exact date, and said there were several factors that indicated the episode occurred in the early spring of 1996. Those included what Carroll said she was wearing — a wool dress and tights but no coat, pointing to slightly chilly weather — and the fact that it was dark when she exited the store.

He also disparages Carroll as “a wack job” and “mentally sick” on the tape. “I have no idea who she is, it came out of the blue, she’s accusing me of rape,” he says.

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E. Jean Carroll and the women who corroborated her story spoke to The New York Times.

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Two other women told the jury they had been sexually assaulted by Trump.

“And when they speak up about what happened, attack,” she added. “Humiliate them. Call them liars. Call them too ugly to assault.”

To prove this point, Ms. Carroll’s lawyers called two women who claimed they had been sexually abused by Donald Trump to testify last week: Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff.

Ms. Leeds, a retired stockbroker, said she met Mr. Trump on an airplane in the late 1970s after a flight attendant invited her to move from coach to first class. She sat in the last open seat, next to Mr. Trump.

During the flight, Ms. Leeds testified Mr. Trump “decided to kiss me and grope me.” She said the unwanted touching came “out of the blue” and “like he had 40 zillion hands.”

Ms. Leeds said Mr. Trump then put his hand up her skirt, causing her to wriggle away and return to her original seat.

After Ms. Leeds went public with her story during Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential run, Mr. Trump denied her accusation during a campaign rally, demeaning her. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” he said. “That I can tell you.”

One day after Ms. Leeds testified, Natasha Stoynoff took the witness stand.

A former writer for People magazine, Ms. Stoynoff said she traveled to Mar-a-Lago in 2005 to write a profile of Mr. Trump and his then-pregnant wife, Melania, on their first anniversary. She testified that Mr. Trump invited her into a room, shut the door and kissed her, holding her against a wall.

After the encounter, Ms. Stoynoff told a few friends including her direct superior. A decade later, Ms. Stoynoff went public with her accusation after Mr. Trump denied kissing women without consent during a 2016 presidential debate.

Mr. Trump referenced Ms. Stoynoff’s allegations at a different campaign rally, two days after he denied Ms. Leeds’s accusations.

“Look at her,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Stoynoff. “I don’t think so.”

“Three different women, decades apart, but one single pattern of behavior,”’ Kaplan says. “In that respect, what happened to E. Jean Carroll is not unique.”

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Kaplan says this behavior is consistent with Dr. Lebowitz’s testimony, saying that Carroll needed to “avoid the fact that she had been negatively impacted in any way by Donald Trump.”

Trump's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, had asked Carroll on the witness stand why she did not scream. Kaplan reminds the jury that Lebowitz said that screaming “is one of the least likely things that actually occur.”

“He raped me whether I screamed or not,” Carroll said.

E. Jean Carroll described an assault in minute detail and sparred with Trump’s lawyers.

Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump asked her to help select a gift for a female friend. “I love to give advice, and here was Donald Trump asking me for advice about buying a present,” she said.

She described to the jury how they went to the lingerie section and stumbled upon a gray-blue bodysuit. Mr. Trump directed her to “go put this on,” she said. She declined and told him to put it on instead — banter that she described as “jesting and joshing.”

Then, she said, Mr. Trump motioned her inside the dressing room, immediately shut the door and shoved her against the wall.

Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump used his weight to pin her and pulled down her tights. She grew emotional as she spoke. “I was pushing him back,” she said, adding, “I was almost too frightened to think.”

“His fingers went into my vagin*, which was extremely painful,” Ms. Carroll said. Then, she said, he inserted his penis.

Ms. Carroll said she used her knee to push Mr. Trump away and fled.

The event had lifelong consequences, she said: “It left me unable to ever have a romantic life again.”

Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations. During cross-examination, a lawyer for the former president questioned Ms. Carroll about her politics, the decades it took her to come forward and her inability to recall the year that the alleged attack took place.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, insinuated that Ms. Carroll strategically chose to reveal her story to increase sales of a memoir in which she first publicly brought her allegation.

Ms. Carroll, however, said that she decided to go public after The New York Times’s “bombshell” reporting about Harvey Weinstein, which set off the #MeToo movement. She said that telling her story about Mr. Trump might be “a way to change the culture of sexual violence.”

The lawyer pressed Ms. Carroll repeatedly about basic facts, probing for inconsistencies and asking about her inability to remember precisely when in 1995 or 1996 the encounter occurred.

“I wish to heaven we could give you a date,” she replied.

Mr. Tacopina also questioned Ms. Carroll about whether she had screamed for help.

“I’m not a screamer,” Ms. Carroll responded. “I was fighting,” she said. “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”

Mr. Tacopina said he was not, but Ms. Carroll, her voice rising, said from the witness stand that women often keep silent about attacks because they fear being asked what they could have done to stop it.

“They are always asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’” Ms. Carroll said.

“He raped me, whether I screamed or not,” she declared.

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Two witnesses said Bergdorf Goodman could be thinly populated.

Ms. Carroll testified that at the time of the incident, Bergdorf’s was relatively empty. She said that there were no attendants in the lingerie section and that the door to the dressing room where she says the rape happened had been left open to allow her and Mr. Trump in. She also testified that no employees attended to her and Mr. Trump while they were in the store.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, has challenged Ms. Carroll’s description of the store, and has stressed in court that she never tried to obtain surveillance video of the alleged attack.

Ms. Carroll called two former Bergdorf employees to the witness stand to bolster her account.

Cheryl Beall, who served as manager of the women’s store in 1996, said that Thursday nights were normally rather quiet. She said the sixth floor, where the lingerie department is, was less busy than other floors.

She also said employees would commonly step away from their posts to take a break or help other clients, and that dressing room doors would often be left open despite an unwritten policy of keeping them closed.

When high-profile clients such as Mr. Trump entered, Ms. Beall said, employees were instructed to be “very discreet.”

“It is very much part of the Bergdorf culture to provide privacy and discretion,” Ms. Beall said.

Robert Salerno, who oversaw security at the time, also testified on behalf of Ms. Carroll. Mr. Salerno said that Bergdorf’s had only a few security cameras at the time and that the tapes were not maintained very long. They were often destroyed or taped over, he said.

In the end, Trump did not testify at the trial, leaving Carroll to define him on her terms.

Last week, Mr. Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina told the court his client would not be testifying or attending the trial.

But early on Thursday, at a golf course in Ireland, Mr. Trump indicated that he might come to court. “I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation against me, and I have a judge who is extremely hostile,” he said.

In response, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who is presiding over the trial in federal court in Manhattan, gave Mr. Trump one more opportunity to reconsider: Mr. Tacopina had until 5 p.m. on Sunday to file a motion asking the judge to allow Mr. Trump to testify.

Yet no motion was filed on Sunday night, and Mr. Trump is not expected to appear in court on Monday.

By not testifying or offering his own account, Mr. Trump is depending on his lawyer’s efforts to erode Ms. Carroll’s credibility. Mr. Tacopina has questioned every aspect of her story, highlighting details he has suggested are implausible and questioning her confusion over details. He has also strongly suggested in cross-examination that she has a political motive to lie.

If the jury finds Ms. Carroll’s story “unbelievable,” Mr. Trump is not likely to be found liable.

Still, Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify or attend the trial has given Ms. Carroll the opportunity to define Mr. Trump on her own terms. Most notably, her legal team, led by Roberta Kaplan, offered selected clips from Mr. Trump’s depositions, rallies and debates that reflect the person they want the jury to see: a celebrity who thinks his star-power gives him the ability to make unwanted sexual advances on women with impunity.

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Here’s a closer look at the E. Jean Carroll trial, day by day.

April 26, April 27, May 1: Carroll Testifies

Ms. Carroll took the stand for three days describing what she says happened in a luxury department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. She described how she ran into Mr. Trump, how he asked her to help him pick out a gift and how he then sexually assaulted her.

Ms. Carroll told the jury how she wasn’t able to have sex or have a romantic relationship after the encounter.

May 2: Lisa Birnbach and Jessica Leeds Testify

The jury heard from one of Ms. Carroll’s friends, Lisa Birnbach, who said Ms. Carroll told her about the alleged attack minutes after it happened, describing her as “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional.” Ms. Birnbach said she told Ms. Carroll to go to the police, but Ms. Carroll decided against it.

Jessica Leeds, who has accused Mr. Trump of groping her and kissing her without her consent on an airplane in the late 1970s, told her story to the jury. Mr. Trump has also denied her account.

A former Bergdorf Goodman employee also testified, along with an expert who said Ms. Carroll’s behavior reflected common responses to traumatic events.

May 3: Cande Carroll and Natasha Stoynoff Testify

Ms. Carroll’s sister backed up Ms. Carroll’s testimony that she did not tell her family about the encounter in the dressing room because her relatives avoided such personal issues.

Natasha Stoynoff described to the jury how she said Mr. Trump kissed her without her consent when she traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a story about his one-year wedding anniversary to Melania Trump.

May 4: Carol Martin and Ashlee Humphreys Testify

Carol Martin, another friend, testified how Ms. Carroll had told her story to her days afterward. Ms. Martin said she was “floored,” and advised Ms. Carroll against going to the police because Mr. Trump’s lawyers would “bury her.”

Ashlee Humphreys, a professor of sociology and communication at Northwestern University, described a report she put together on the harm caused by Mr. Trump’s October 2022 statement on Truth Social, the social media company he founded, in which he denied the allegation and called Ms. Carroll’s case “a complete con job” and said she made up the allegation to sell her memoir.

Ms. Humphreys said it would cost as much as $2.7 million to run a campaign that would repair Ms. Carroll’s reputation.