Writer E Jean Carroll has told a court that Donald Trump shattered her reputation and continues to inspire venom against her from strangers because she claimed he sexually abused her decades ago.
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 US president. He vehemently denied attacking her or even knowing her.
A jury last year found that Mr Trump sexually abused her and defamed her in October 2022.
During Ms Carroll’s evidence, Mr Trump grimaced, shook his head and animatedly turned to speak to his lawyer, who lobbed multiple objections seeking to prevent the jury from hearing details of her sexual assault allegations.
“I’ve paid just about as dearly as it’s possible to pay,” she said, referencing the damage she said Mr Trump had caused.
She entered the witness box after a hostile encounter between Trump lawyer Alina Habba and Judge Lewis A Kaplan over the judge’s refusal to adjourn the trial on Thursday, so Mr Trump could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.
Ms Habba called the judge’s ruling “insanely prejudicial” but the judge cut her off, saying he would “hear no further argument on it”.
The lawyer 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 trying to convince a jury that Mr 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 frontrunner on the Republican ticket and won the Iowa caucuses on Monday.
“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.
He said Mr Trump’s public lies about her began in June 2019 and have continued without interruption.
“He lied last month. He lied on Sunday. He lied yesterday. And I am here to get my reputation back,” she said.
She said she opened a social media website on Tuesday and saw a post that said: “Hey lady, you’re a fraud.”
She told the court she had been 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.
Mr Trump, who is juggling court appearances with campaign stops, sat in on jury selection on Tuesday. Before opening statements, he left for a New Hampshire rally.
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, an advice columnist and magazine writer, has said that Mr Trump harmed her deeply. First, she 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 even 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 Mr Trump’s reaction to them. Elle has said her contract was not renewed for unrelated reasons.
Mr Trump claims nothing ever happened between him and Ms Carroll and that he never met her. He says a 1987 party photo of them and their then-spouses “doesn’t count” because it was a momentary greeting.
