Reuters
KEY POINTS
- Trump’s lawyer continues to deny the claims, saying Carroll’s account is “fiction”
- Carroll’s lead lawyer said that Trump’s defense meant everyone else is lying
- The jury will begin deliberating on Tuesday
As E. Jean Carroll’s civil rape lawsuit against former President Donald Trump comes to a close, her lawyers pressed on his absence throughout the proceedings and told the jury that his failure to testify on his behalf or even just show up meant he’s guilty of the allegations made against him.
“He just decided not to be here,” Michael J. Ferrara, one of Carroll’s lawyers, told the jury. “He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll.”
Carroll’s lead lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, challenged the jurors to either believe the 10 witnesses they presented on her behalf or the former president, who did not even take the stand.
She also said that Trump’s defense could never hold water since it only meant that everyone “is lying about everything.”
“In order to find for him, you have to find Donald Trump, the nonstop liar, is the only one in this court telling the truth,” Kaplan said, per The Guardian.
Carroll is suing Trump for damages for battery after he allegedly sexually harassed her in 1996 in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman and for defamation when he accused her of lying and perpetrating a hoax after she wrote about her experiences in a book.
She was able to sue Trump even though the incident happened decades ago due to legislation passed in New York that removed the statute of limitation for sexual harassment-related cases.
Meanwhile, Trump’s defense attorney, Joe Tacopina, said Carroll’s accounts of the event were “Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable,” according to a New York Times report.
“The whole story is an unbelievable work of fiction,” Tacopina said. “Everything in this case is one of those things.”
The jurors will begin deliberations on Tuesday after U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan instructs them on the law.
The standard of proof needed for a conviction in a civil case is different from that in a criminal case, which means that the jury needed to decide whether Carroll’s lawyers proved by a preponderance of evidence that Trump committed battery.
Aside from Carroll, two other women testified in the trial, saying they, too, were assaulted by Trump.
Former stockbroker Jessica Leeds said that Trump groped and kissed her without her consent in the ’70s. Former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff also testified that Trump pushed her against a wall and kissed her without her consent in one of the rooms in Mar-a-Lago during an assignment.
“You must hold him to account in this court for what he has done,” Kaplan said.
She also said that no one, not even former presidents who behaved erratically, is above the law.
