Donald Trump’s civil trial, in which he is accused of raping the journalist E. Jean Carroll at an upscale Manhattan clothing store in the mid Nineties, is underway in Manhattan federal court.
After about two hours of questioning (known as voir dire), Judge Lewis Kaplan seated a jury of nine — six men and three women. A jury of twelve is not required in a civil trial as it is in criminal cases. The jurors will remain anonymous, their identities withheld from the parties as well as the public.
Opening statements began this afternoon. Shawn Crowley, a lawyer for Carroll, told the jury the alleged rape occurred in the spring of 1996. The time frame is interesting because Carroll has previously expressed uncertainty about whether the incident she alleges happened in 1996 or 1995.
The trial is expected to take one to two weeks. Carroll is present at the proceedings, and her lawyers say she will testify. Trump is not present, and his lead lawyer, Joe Tacopina, has been noncommittal about whether he will testify or even attend the trial, although he is on the defense witness list.
Carroll’s attorneys plan to present statements Trump made in his extensive pretrial deposition; it is unlikely they will call him for in-person testimony before the jury. They will also present two witnesses to whom Carroll says she provided contemporaneous accounts of the alleged rape, two other witnesses who claim to have been sexually assaulted by Trump in the past, and a portion of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump is heard bragging about being sexually aggressive.
The federal courthouse in which the trial is taking place is a short walk from the state criminal court in which Trump was recently arraigned on his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney. That criminal case, of course, involves the accounting of payments for a nondisclosure agreement with a porn star who claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. Trump’s lawyers in the civil case asked for a delay out of concern about the effect on the jury pool of the publicity generated by the criminal indictment.
Judge Kaplan denied that application, reasoning that the two matters were completely unrelated. Hence, the start of the civil trial this afternoon.