The legal attacks on former President and now Presidential candidate Donald Trump have been consistent since he announced his candidacy in November. In a retroactive move, Elle columnist Jean Carroll sued Trump for battery and defamation in November over an alleged attack in 1996. Trump has denied the accusation, calling Carroll a liar, and the trial began last week.
Carroll testified at a trial that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan, most likely in the spring of 1996. She said a chance encounter brought the pair together in an episode that was fun and flirtatious until Trump became violent in the dressing room.
Trump, in Scotland to tour his golf properties and plans to open another, has called the charges a “hoax.” Trump, 76, has long denied that rape happened, that he was at the store with Carroll, or that he even knew her beyond fleeting moments when pictures were taken of them in group settings in other years.
Trump has also insisted that Carroll was motivated by political reasons and a desire to sell copies of the 2019 memoir where she first publicly revealed her rape claims while Trump was still president. Carroll has testified that she would have kept her accusation secret forever if not for the #MeToo movement, which gained prominence in 2017.
As the defense cross-examined E. Jean Carroll today, a pertinent point was revealed.
Daily Mail reports:
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina asked Carroll if she thought it was an “astonishing coincidence” that her allegations were the identical to a 2012 episode of Law & Order: SVU. A jury heard that the episode was about a character who fantasizes about being raped in the lingerie dressing room of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman, as Carroll alleged Trump did in the mid 1990s
Carroll agreed it was similar but denied watching SVU as she thought it was too violent. The jury in Manhattan was shown an email from June 2019 sent to Carroll by a friend who warned her the SVU episode was airing. Titled “Theatre Tricks”, it was about a ‘character that speaks of a fantasy that he rapes a woman in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the lingerie department, the friend, Grace Brophy said.
Brophy warned Carroll, whose book accusing Trump for the first time had come out weeks earlier, that “Trumpsters will use this against you”. Carroll emailed back that she “hadn’t seen it” but she was “not surprised” as “this happens all the time with Law & Order stories”.
Tacopina asked why Carroll was not surprised by the inclusion of the rape storyline. She replied that the writers of the show were “very good at keying into the psychology of their viewers” and one of the “most frequent fantasies” for men and women was rape.
With incredulity, Tacopina asked if it was as specific as a rape in the Bergdorf Goodman lingerie department dressing room. As Carroll saw it, the parallels were an “amazing coincidence”. Tacopina asked: “Five years before you come out with your story (about Trump) it’s an astonishing coincidence?”
Under questioning from her lawyer Michael Ferrara, Carroll denied having seen the episode of SVU or having heard of it before 2019. Ferrara said: “Are you making up your allegations based on what happened in a popular television show?” Carrol said no. Carroll concluded giving testimony and walked out the court smiling arm-in-arm with her attorney Roberts Kaplan.
Tacopina had written a letter last week asking for a mistrial, complaining that the judge shut down his questioning when he pushed Carroll to explain why she did not scream, why she didn’t tell police or attempt afterward to retrieve footage from video cameras at the store’s doors to prove that she and Trump were there together. Carroll responded that “People always ask, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’ Some women scream; some do not,” said Carroll.
Tacopina’s complaints about the judge’s rulings followed tense exchanges in court with the witness Thursday, where he complains the judge shut down his line of questioning. Tacopina also asked that Kaplan correct the record for any rulings that mischaracterized the evidence or permit Tacopina more latitude in questioning Carroll.
Prior to the cross-examination on Monday, the New York judge denied Trump’s demand to declare a mistrial after his attorney Tacopina claimed the ex-president was being treated unfairly. Tacopina cited “pervasive unfair and prejudicial rulings” by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan as he prepared to once again cross-examine Carroll in a New York court.
Judge Kaplan then issued the denial, without giving a reason, and Carroll’s case continued on Monday morning, Daily Mail reports.
There has been no statement as to why Carroll would wait such a number of years to accuse Trump of rape, and wait until he is in his second candidacy for the office of President of the United States.
Rephrased from: The Republic Brief By: Trump Knows
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