Trump’s lawyer calls civil rape case an affront to justice system

(Reuters) - Donald Trump’s lawyer on Monday called a rape and defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll against the former U.S. president an affront to the justice system.

During closing arguments in a civil trial in Manhattan federal court, the lawyer Joseph Tacopina urged jurors to set aside any opinions they might have about Trump and reject what the lawyer called Carroll’s effort to “profit” from what he called a false story.

“What E. Jean Carroll has done here is an affront to justice. She has abused this system by bringing a false claim for amongst other things money, status, political reasons,” Tacopina said.

Trump accuses Carroll of making up the story to drive sales of a 2019 memoir in which she made her claims public.

Carroll, 79, filed her lawsuit last year against Trump, 76, claiming he raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996, and then defamed her by denying it happened. The former Elle magazine advice columnist is seeking unspecified monetary damages.

Her defamation claim concerns an October 2022 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform in which he called her allegations a “complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”

Earlier on Monday, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump says women let him “grab ‘em by the pussy” bolstered the accounts of Carroll and other women who accuse Trump of sexual assault.

“He admitted on video to doing exactly the kinds of things that have brought us here to this courtroom,” Kaplan said in her closing argument.

Trump, who served as president from 2017 to 2021 and is the front-runner for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination in 2024, waived his right to testify at trial and opted not to present a defense, gambling that jurors will find that Carroll failed to make a persuasive case.