E. Jean Carroll takes the witness stand at civil trial; ‘I’m here because Donald Trump raped me’

NEW YORK – Writer E. Jean Carroll took the witness stand Wednesday in her civil rape case against former President Donald Trump.

“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to get my life back,” Carroll told jurors within minutes of taking her seat.

Carroll walked the jury through her upbringing as the firstborn of four who grew up in a Republican household in rural Indiana. The 79-year-old has accused Trump of sexually assaulting and raping her inside a changing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store where they were both shopping in the spring of 1996. She said the attack occurred once they were alone on the sixth floor after Trump had asked her to help pick out lingerie for a girlfriend.

“I was leaving the store and I was exiting the 58th Street entrance and I was just about to walk out the door; he was standing on the other side of it and put up his hand,” Carroll testified. “I stopped … he came through the door and said, ‘Hey, you’re that advice lady.’ … I said, ‘Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon.’

“I was delighted. Well, it was such a fun New York scene … here was Donald Trump asking me for advice about buying a present; it was a wonderful prospect for me.”

In her opening argument, the former Elle advice columnist’s lawyer Shawn Crowley described a hulking Trump using one arm to hold Carroll against a wall in a dressing room and the other to molest her before he raped her. Carroll said she broke free after 2 or 3 minutes.

When asked Wednesday what happened once Carroll and Trump entered the dressing room, she said he “immediately shut the door and shoved me up against the wall and shoved me so hard my head banged.”

“I was extremely confused and suddenly realized that what I thought was happening was not happening,” Carroll testified. “I remember him being, he was very large. And his whole weight … came against my chest and held me up there and he leaned down and pulled down my tights.

“I was pushing him back. It was quite clear that I was not, didn’t want anything else to happen.”

Trump, who denies the assault, took to Truth Social following the first day of his trial, lambasting the case as a “made up SCAM.”

In the social media post, he also claimed a dress Carroll wore during the alleged assault should be included as evidence. For years, Carroll’s lawyers sought to include the dress in the case, with Trump refusing to provide a DNA sample to test it against.

After the judge set a trial date and the evidence stage in the case had ended, Trump retained another new lawyer and changed his mind about the DNA. He offered to submit genetic material in exchange for records from Carroll.

“He, for three years, refused to give a DNA sample, and now he wants it in the case?” Judge Lewis Kaplan said in court Wednesday.

Kaplan, who’s urged the parties to refrain from making statements that could lead to violence or civil unrest, stopped short of reprimanding Trump’s legal team for the ex-president’s “entirely inappropriate” comments.

“Your client is basically endeavoring, certainly to speak to (the) public … more troublesome, the jury in this case, about stuff that has no business being spoken about,” the judge said.

Kaplan told Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina that Trump “may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability.”

Tacopina said he would talk to Trump and “to the degree I have the ability to” will ask him to refrain from further commentary.

Trump’s comments about officials involved in his various legal cases served as the basis for Kaplan to rule that the jury would be anonymous, citing the potential of his online attacks to result in real-world harm.