Donald Trump‘s rape accuser told a court Thursday how she was met with a ‘wave of slime’ after the former president attacked her on social media.
E. Jean Carroll said that when Trump called her a liar in October 2022 his supporters made her feel ‘too ugly to live’.
The court was shown Tweets by Trump supporters which said the former President ‘wouldn’t touch that ugly b**** with (his) d***.’
Trump’s lawyers were expected to question her about the specifics of the alleged rape later in the day.
During cross examination she admitted she could not remember the date and that she only went public with her claims about Trump in 2019 when she was promoting her book.
E. Jean Carroll said on Thursday that when Donald Trump called her a liar on social media in October 2022 his supporters made her feel ‘too ugly to live’
Carroll claims that Trump raped her in the changing room of a department store in the mid 90s and is suing him for battery
Carroll told the court that after she published her book in 2019 Trump called her a liar in an official statement issued when he was president
Carroll, 79, an advice columnist, claims Trump raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan around 1996.
She has sued him at the civil court in New York for battery and defamation over his comments about her allegations.
Carroll told the court that after she published her book in 2019 Trump called her a liar in an official statement issued when he was president.
By 2022 she was ‘gaining back some ground’ but Trump called her lawsuit a ‘SCAM’ in a lengthy post on Truth Social and denied it again.
Carrol said: ‘Boom, it knocked me back down’.
She described the ensuing abuse as a ‘wave of slime’. She said: ‘It was seedy comments, very denigrating, repeating what Donald Trump said, I was a liar, I was in it for the money, I couldn’t wait for the payday, I was working for the Democrats but the main thing was I was too ugly.
‘It’s hard to get up in the morning receiving the message you’re just too ugly to go on living’.
The court was shown a tweet from a Trump supporter which read: ‘I know for a fact Mr. President wouldn’t touch that ugly b**** with your d****’.
Another tweet called Carroll a ‘troll’ and a ‘bulls******’.
Carroll said that she regretted filing the lawsuit ‘five times a day’ as she continued to get threats on social media, including that morning when she checked Twitter.
Under cross examination from Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, Carroll admitted that parts of her story were ‘difficult to conceive’ and ‘odd’.
She said that ‘status is important’ for her and after being fired from her job with Elle magazine, where she wrote her advice column, in 2019 she felt like ‘just another person’.
Trump’s statement branding her Carroll a liar in October 2022
Trump fumed this week that the entire case was fueled by Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, whose nonprofit gave money towards Carroll’s defense
Bergdorf Goodman (above) is only a block away from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue
Carroll admitted that she only went public with her claims that same year when she was promoting her 2019 book ‘What do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal’.
Tacopina asked if the book was ‘your version’ of what happened with Trump
Carroll shot back ‘Those are the facts’.
The jury was shown a 2019 email Carroll sent to an editor at New York magazine, which ran an excerpt of the book including the part about Trump.
In it Carroll said that she thought Trump, who was President at the time, was ‘trying to kill me’ as he was ‘poisoning my water’ and ‘polluting my air and cooking my planet’.
The jury was also shown an email Carroll received from her friend Carol Martin, a TV journalist, in 2017 in which Martin called Trump ‘Orange Crush’.
Martin wrote: ‘This has to stop. As soon as we are both well enough to scheme we must do our patriotic duty again’.
Carroll replied: ‘TOTALLY!!! I have something special for you when we meet’.
Asked about what she meant, Carroll said she had ‘no idea’ what the special thing could have been.
But the court heard that just two weeks later, she embarked on a road trip speaking to women across America that would form the basis of her book.
Carroll insisted that the word ‘scheme’ had ‘no connotations of evil’ and that it was the MeToo movement, which began in 2017, that was her motivation for writing the book, not Trump.
But she admitted she hadn’t ever gone to the police in the two decades since the alleged rape.
Trump was represented by Joe Tacopina, the barrel-chested attorney who is representing him in the criminal case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and five other attorneys
Tacopina asked: ‘When you were trying to sell your book and get money for your book was when you first mentioned the story about Donald Trump, correct?’
Carroll said yes.
Carroll admitted she couldn’t remember when the incident happened, telling the jury: ‘I wish to heaven we could give you a date’.
There was laughter in court when Tacopina asked about the premise of Carroll’s book was that every man in the US should be ‘disposed of’.
Carroll said that the idea was they would go to Montana to be ‘retrained’.
Tacopina asked if she meant ‘all the men in this country, in this courtroom should go to Montana to be retrained?’
Carroll said that it was written satirically.
Judge Lewis Kaplan told Tacopina that the book was a reference to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, a satirical essay published in 1729, and told him to move on.