A journalist friend testifies that Carroll called at the time to relate that Trump had raped her minutes earlier.
A journalist friend testifies that Carroll called at the time to relate that Trump had raped her minutes earlier.
A t the civil trial in Manhattan federal court of E. Jean Carroll’s claims that Donald Trump raped her nearly 30 years ago, then defamed her after she went public about it in 2019, a journalist friend of Carroll’s has corroborated a key part of her account. Lisa Birnbach, a writer based in New York, told the jury on Tuesday that Carroll called her to report that she’d been sexually assaulted by the real-estate magnate at a high-end midtown department store, five to seven minutes after the incident allegedly occurred.
Meantime, at the close of Tuesday’s session, to the surprise of no one, Trump’s lawyers advised Judge Lewis Kaplan that Trump will not be testifying at the trial. The former president and current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination has not attended the proceedings and is not expected to — indeed, he was in Scotland Monday breaking ground on a new Trump golf course.
In Tuesday’s testimony, Birnbach told the panel of six men and three women that the call from Carroll occurred early one evening in the spring of 1996. It was around 6 p.m. and she was feeding her children dinner when, she recalled, the phone rang. On the other end, a “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional” Carroll related that Trump had “pulled down my tights” and raped her moments earlier. Birnbach recalled urging her to go to the police, but said that Carroll was adamant about not doing that and pleaded with Birnbach never to speak of the matter again — a request Birnbach says she honored, not even speaking with Carroll about it again until 2019.
At the time of the alleged 1996 incident, Birnbach had just spent two days at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, working on a profile of him for New York Magazine. “He didn’t strike me as dangerous,” she conceded in her testimony. The fact that she’d been working on a Trump piece (which was published in the magazine’s February 12, 1996, issue) may go some way toward explaining why Carroll chose to call her.
Birnbach was the second witness called by the plaintiff’s side, after the first witness, Carroll herself, finished three days of testimony on Monday afternoon.
It is impossible, for me at least, to assess the impact the testimony is having on the jury. One needs to be in the courtroom to get a sense of that. That said, and even assuming that the press is hostile to Trump and sympathetic to Carroll, it appears that Carroll was an effective witness.
To be sure, her story has problems. For example, as we’ve discussed, it is not supported by any forensic evidence. On the surface, it is hard to imagine even a person as impulsive as Trump sexually assaulting a woman in a store during business hours under circumstances where he might easily have been caught. Moreover, Carroll not only did not go to the police at the time and did not speak publicly about the matter for decades; over the years she did not behave as if she were traumatized by the event and its alleged perpetrator. She did not hesitate to return, repeatedly, to Bergdorf Goodman, the scene of the alleged rape. She also describes herself as a “massive” fan of Donald Trump’s reality-TV show, The Apprentice (“very impressed by it”; “I had never seen such a witty competition on TV”). And in 2017, she publicly and weirdly joked about Trump, asking Facebook followers whether they’d have sex with him for $17,000 if they could “give the money to charity” or “close your eyes and he’s not allowed to speak.”
Carroll also seemed like something of an oddball when she appeared on CNN for an interview by Anderson Cooper about her allegations, opining that “most people think of rape as being sexy.” Nevertheless, in context, and contrary to insinuations in Trump’s public commentary, she was not saying that she thought rape was sexy; indeed, she insisted that her personal experience of rape was physically and mentally painful. (On the witness stand, she elaborated that she made the “sexy” comment because rape scenes are routinely included in dramas, such as Game of Thrones, but that to her “rape is the most horrible violent act that can be done against a woman or a man.”)
It does not appear that Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina scored any major hits in two days of cross-examining Carroll. He did raise some interesting points. In particular, he pressed Carroll about the curious happenstance of a 2012 episode of the popular television drama Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which a woman is raped in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Without much subtlety, Tacopina was implying that Carroll had fabricated the story about Trump based on the television program; though she concurred that it was an “astonishing” coincidence, Carroll denied making up the story, let alone doing so based on a TV show.
Tacopina tried to shake Carroll’s insistence that she was assaulted by pointing out that she hadn’t screamed and maintaining that her account of pushing Trump off of her (based on how her tights were positioned, and her recollection that she was holding a purse in one hand) was implausible. At least according to the in-court reporting, Carroll parried these questions well. Tacopina thus homed in on her biases: She is a lifelong Democrat who found Trump’s presidential policies objectionable and who included the Trump-rape story in her book believing it would boost sales (though Carroll conceded that sales were disappointing). He also pointed out that, while Carroll has also publicly claimed that former CBS honcho Les Moonves groped her, Carroll did not sue him when he denied it. Of course, she did not contend that Moonves raped her, as she says Trump did; and it’s a considerable leap from complaining about a politician’s policies, or even writing accusingly about him in a book, to alleging under oath that he is guilty of sexual assault.
We can infer that Tacopina did not think he’d made much headway because, before continuing with his cross-examination on Monday, he moved for a mistrial, claiming that Judge Lewis Kaplan was undermining him with “pervasive unfair and prejudicial rulings” during the questioning. Legally, this is a weak motion and there was no chance that Kaplan would grant it. One must assume, then, that Tacopina is laying the groundwork — for appellate and public-relations purposes — for Trump to contend, if he is found liable, that the judge was biased against him and protected Carroll from being aggressively cross-examined. (In fact, it appears that Tacopina was quite aggressive, though appropriately civil.)
Trump’s defense team continued with the political-bias theme in trying to discredit Lisa Birnbach’s testimony. Birnbach is a humorist, podcaster, and occasional Washington Post contributor. She has publicly referred to Trump as “an infection like herpes that we can’t get rid of,” “Vladimir Putin’s agent,” and “a narcissistic sociopath.” The Times reports that one of the tense trial’s more amusing moments arose when Carroll’s lawyers objected to the Trump team’s cross-examination about these scathing quips. Trump lawyer W. Perry Brandt countered that he was trying to show Birnbach’s bias, prompting Judge Kaplan to deadpan, “Oh, really?”
I doubt the Trump team is making much of a splash by demonstrating that E. Jean Carroll and her circle of Manhattan Democrat friends despise Trump. That would be assumed by a jury of New Yorkers (drawn from throughout the Southern District, not just Manhattan). Still, that doesn’t mean the jury (or at least a juror or two) will necessarily reject the possibility that anti-Trump derangement could have driven Carroll and her friends to concoct a tall tale.
The last witness presented by Carroll’s lawyers on Tuesday was Jessica Leeds, a former salesperson and stockbroker, who maintains that, when she was about 37 in the late 1970s (i.e., over a decade before the incident Carroll alleges), Trump sexually assaulted her on a flight to New York. She said she was heading home to Connecticut from Atlanta or Dallas when a flight attendant invited her to sit in first class — in an empty seat next to Trump. She said she was the only woman in the front cabin. After introductory pleasantries and some small talk, she recalls that, “out of the blue,” Trump “decided to kiss and grope” her breasts and reach up her skirt, as if “he had 40 zillion hands.” Leeds said she managed to escape his clutches and went back to her original seat on the plane.
The encounter lasted for just seconds, but she remembered it as seeming much longer. Years later, she recounted running into Trump and his then-wife Ivana at a fundraiser, and that he cuttingly said, “I remember you. You’re the c*** from the airplane.” Leeds related that she remained silent about these incidents until watching the presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton after the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released. She said she was moved to come forward when, during the debate, Trump denied ever kissing or groping women without their consent — the kind of conduct he bragged about on the tape, which the jury will hear later in the ongoing trial.
On cross-examination, Tacopina stuck to the strategy of focusing on Democratic Party bias against his client, highlighting Leeds’s partisan activism, in addition to the passing of decades between the incident she alleges and her publication of it, timed to help Clinton’s 2016 campaign. He also spotlighted her inability to remember with precision what year the alleged assault occurred and from what city she was flying, as well as suggesting it was incredible that, though the incident between strangers lasted only seconds, Trump would recognize her at a fundraiser years later — and would make a vile remark to her, in a public setting, in front of his wife.
The trial continues today. Carroll’s attorneys still plan to call as witnesses journalist Carol Martin, who will testify about another contemporaneous report (within days after the alleged rape); Natasha Stoynoff, who is another claimed victim of a Trump sexual assault; and an expert on how women deal with sexual assault. As noted above, Carroll’s team will also play the Access Hollywood tape for the jury. With Trump refraining from testimony, it looks like there will be little in the way of a defense case beyond, perhaps, playing portions of his pretrial deposition. It is possible that we could reach summations and jury deliberation by week’s end.