Donald Trump has been threatened with expulsion from a civil trial courtroom after he repeatedly ignored a warning to keep quiet while writer E Jean Carroll described how he shattered her reputation after she accused him of sexual abuse.
Judge Lewis A Kaplan told the former US president that his right to be present at the trial would be revoked if he kept being disruptive.
After an initial warning, Ms Carroll’s lawyer said Mr Trump could still be heard making remarks to his lawyers, including “it is a witch hunt” and “it really is a con job”.
“Mr Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial,” Judge Kaplan said in an exchange after the jury was excused for lunch, adding: “I understand you’re probably eager for me to do that.”
“I would love it,” Mr Trump shot back, shrugging as he sat between lawyers Alina Habba and Michael Madaio at the defence table.
“I know you would like it. You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently,” Judge Kaplan responded.
“You can’t either,” Mr Trump muttered.
The former president later criticised Judge Kaplan on social media, describing the Bill Clinton appointee as “seething and hostile”, and “abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial”.
The judge cracked down after Carroll lawyer Shawn Crowley complained for a second time that Mr Trump could be heard “loudly saying things that are false” as he sat at the defence table, frequently tilting back in his chair and leaning over to speak with his lawyer.
Among his comments, Ms Crowley said, were that the long-time Elle magazine advice columnist was lying about the assault and that she seemed to have “gotten her memory back”.
The lawyer suggested that if Ms Carroll’s lawyers could hear Mr Trump from where they were sitting, about 12ft away, then jurors might have been able to hear him as well.
“I’m just going to ask Mr Trump to take special care to keep his voice down when conferring with counsel to make sure the jury does not hear it,” Judge Kaplan had said earlier before jurors returned to the courtroom after a morning break.
Earlier, without the jury in the courtroom, Mr Trump slammed his hand on the defence table when the judge again refused his lawyer’s request that the trial be suspended on Thursday so the ex-president could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in Florida.
Ms Carroll, 80, was the first witness in a Manhattan federal court trial to determine any damages owed by Mr Trump for remarks he made while he was president in June 2019. He denied attacking her or even knowing her.
A jury last year found that Mr Trump sexually abused her in 1996 and defamed her when he made a round of denials in October 2022.
The judge has put limitations on the trial in light of the previous verdict and prior rulings he made restricting the infusion of political talk into the proceedings.
Ms Habba raised multiple objections seeking to prevent the jury from hearing details of Ms Carroll’s sexual assault allegations.
“I’ve paid just about as dearly as it’s possible to pay,” the writer said, referencing the damage she said Mr Trump had caused to her reputation.
She said Mr Trump’s vitriol toward her has not ceased, pointing to multiple social media posts he had made about her in recent days, and that his rhetoric continues to inspire venom against her from strangers because she claimed he sexually abused her decades ago.
“He lied last month. He lied on Sunday. He lied yesterday. And I am here to get my reputation back,” Ms Carroll said.
She said she opened a social media website on Tuesday and saw a post that said: “Hey lady, you’re a fraud.”
She went into the witness box after a hostile encounter between Ms Habba and Judge Kaplan — culminating in Mr Trump’s desk slam — over the judge’s refusal to adjourn the trial on Thursday so Mr Trump could attend the funeral for former first lady Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, who died last week.
Ms Habba called the judge’s ruling “insanely prejudicial” but he cut her off, saying he would “hear no further argument on it”. She told the judge: “I will not be spoken to that way, your honour.”
When she mentioned the funeral again, the judge responded: “It’s denied. Sit down. Bring in the jury.”
Ms Carroll’s evidence came less than a year after she was in the same chair aiming to convince a jury that Trump could be held accountable in a way that would stop him from frequent verbal attacks against her as he campaigns for the presidency. He is the front-runner on the Republican ticket.
“I’m here because Donald Trump assaulted me and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened. He lied and shattered my reputation,” she said.
She said that once she was a respected advice columnist. “Now, I’m known as the liar, the fraud and the whack job.”
Because the first jury found that Mr Trump sexually abused Ms Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her in 2022, the new trial concerns only how much more — if anything — he will be ordered to pay her for other remarks he made in 2019 while he was president.
Trump, who is juggling court appearances with campaign stops, sat in on jury selection on Tuesday. Before opening statements began, he left for a rally in New Hampshire.
He wrote on social media on Tuesday that the case was nothing but “fabricated lies and political shenanigans” which had garnered his accuser money and fame.
“I am the only one injured by this attempted EXTORTION,” read a post on his Truth Social platform.
Ms Carroll claims he forced himself on her in a dressing room after a chance meeting at a luxury department store in 1996. Then he publicly impugned her honesty, her motives and her sanity after she told the story publicly in a 2019 memoir.
She has maintained she lost millions of readers and her longtime post at Elle magazine, where her Ask E Jean advice column ran for over a quarter of a century, because of her allegations and Trump’s reaction to them. Elle has said her contract was not renewed for unrelated reasons.
Mr Trump claims nothing happened between him and Ms Carroll and that he had never met her. He says a 1987 party photo of them and their then-spouses “doesn’t count” because it was a momentary greeting.
