Trial gets underway in E. Jean Carroll's rape lawsuit against Trump

NEW YORK >> A former advice columnist's nearly 30-year-old rape claim against Donald Trump went to trial Tuesday as jurors in the federal civil case heard her allegation of being attacked in a luxury department store dressing room. The former president says nothing happened between them.

E. Jean Carroll will testify that what unfolded in a few minutes in a fitting room in 1996 “would change her life forever,” one of her lawyers, Shawn Crowley, said in an opening statement.

“Filled with fear and shame, she kept silent for decades. Eventually, though, silence became impossible,” Crowley said. And when Carroll broke that silence in a 2019 memoir, the then-president “used the most powerful platform on Earth to lie about what he had done, attack Ms. Carroll's integrity and insult her appearance.”

Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina painted her story as wildly implausible and short of evidence, and described it as “an affront to justice.” He accused her of pursuing the case for money, status and political reasons.

“It all comes down to: Do you believe the unbelievable?” Tacopina told the six-man, three-woman jury. He urged the panel in heavily Democratic New York to put politics aside in weighing the case against the Republican ex-president and ex-New Yorker.

“You can hate Donald Trump. That's OK. But there's a time and a secret place for that. It's called a ballot box in an election. It's not here in a court of law,” Tacopina said. “Nobody's above the law, but no one is beneath it.”

The trial stands to test Trump's “Teflon Don” reputation for shaking off serious legal problems and to reprise accounts of the type of sexual misconduct that rocked his 2016 presidential campaign as he seeks office again. He denies Carroll's claim and all the others, saying they were falsehoods spun up to damage him.