Demeaning a beauty queen, boasting about forcing himself on women, then having the gall to deny he’s ever sexually harassed anyone—that’s the side of Donald Trump the former president’s lawyers don’t want New York City jurors to see as they consider whether or not he raped a magazine columnist decades ago.
On Monday, a federal judge finalized some key issues in the Bill Cosby-type civil trial where Trump is accused of raping the magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room at a high-end Manhattan department store. Among them is the evidence that’ll be shown.
Trump’s lawyers are trying to stop a long list of video clips and photos from being presented at trial, labeling them “irrelevant and unduly prejudicial.” The judge still has not made a final determination about what he will allow at trial.
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For now, Trump’s lawyers dog-earing all the clips they don’t want jurors to see could have the opposite effect, like when Barbra Streisand turned to the courts in 2003 to suppress a photo of her Malibu home. And you can watch all the clips in the above video.
The Access Hollywood tape
It didn’t cost him the 2016 election, but lawyers worry it’ll cost him a ton of money now. This is the infamous tape, first exposed by The Washington Post, in which Trump was caught on a hot mic bragging about his ability to get away with sexually assaulting women while riding in a bus with Access Hollywood correspondent Billy Bush.
In it, Trump gloats about the way he tried to have sex with entertainment reporter Nancy O'Dell, saying he “tried to move on her like a bitch” but “couldn't get there and she was married.” Then, as they prepare to meet the actress Arianne Zucker, the real estate mogul revels in the way he has forced himself on women in the past.
“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump said. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Misogynistic bluster at campaign rallies
Trump’s lawyers also want to hide the way he responded to a wave of sexual assault claims. In the final weeks before the 2016 presidential election, The New York Times unearthed stories of several women who said Trump had acted inappropriately toward them. Rachel Crooks remembered how, while she was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group in Trump Tower, the real estate mogul wouldn’t let go of her hand and forcibly kissed her several times in 2006. Jessica Leeds recalled a time when she was a young saleswoman wearing a posh brown tweed suit on a Dallas-New York flight, surprised that a flight attendant invited her to sit in first class next to Donald Trump—who proceeded to grab her breasts and run his hand up her skirt.
Readers might recall her description of Trump: “It’s like he’s got four extra hands.”
In the days that followed that damning news story, Trump ranted at political rallies, chalking up the accusations as mere chicanery.
“These vicious claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false… and the Clintons know it, and they know it very well. These claims are all fabricated. They're pure fiction and they're outright lies. These events never, ever happened,” he said at an Oct. 13, 2016 rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.
But as the days went on, Trump turned up the heat. But in doing so, he relied on the same methods to discredit them that he’s now using against Carroll.
“No witness, no backup, no anything else,” he said at an Oct. 14, 2016 rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Sometimes they do it for fame, maybe they get money, who knows.”
But those clips also build the case that Trump has been at this predatory game for years—particularly with reporters. At these rallies, he talked about how Natasha Stoynoff traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a People magazine story about Trump’s one-year wedding anniversary with his pregnant wife Melania—only to, as she would later recall, have him corner her and kiss her against her will.
Trump at rallies jabbed at her looks, the way he later did with Carroll. He questioned how it could happen in an area with other people, as he did with Carroll as well. And he asked why this journalist kept it secret so long, as he would with Carroll too.
“She said I made inappropriate advances, and by the way the area was a public area—people all over the place,” he said at one rally. “Look at her, look at her words, you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”
“Why didn’t she put it in the story?” he asked at another event. “The story would have been one of the big stories—I was the big star of The Apprentice. Why didn’t she do it 12 years ago?”
Then there’s the Oct. 21, 2016, speech he gave in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he showed his penchant for silencing accusers by inundating them with legal threats.
“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign. Total fabrication. The events never happened, never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over,” he said then, to big applause.
That time Hillary raked him through the coals
Yet another video clip Trump’s lawyers want to keep from jurors is his Sept. 26, 2016, presidential debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, where she brought up the way he used his position of authority over the Miss Universe contest to torment a beauty queen.
“This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men,” Clinton said, as Trump dismissed her.
“And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado,” Clinton said.
The backstory, if jurors get to hear it, is appalling—even by Trump standards. Machado was crowned Miss Universe in 1996. When she was set to crown her successor on TV, Trump called in a fitness expert to make her quickly slim down, according to People magazine, which quoted Trump as saying that “she is working on her problem.” His concern? “You really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state,” he said.
The women themselves
But Trump’s lawyers don’t just want to hide their client’s past; they also want to silence the many women who’ve come forward the way Carroll has.
In court documents, his legal team is trying to block a video recorded deposition last October of Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump administration press secretary who wrote that his White House was a lewd pit of misogyny—describing how the president became so obsessed with a young press aide that he requested she board Air Force One just to look at her ass.
Trump’s legal team, which is led by New Jersey attorney Alina Habba, wants to block her testimony as “hearsay.”
But they also want to block a video deposition of Stoynoff, the People magazine journalist who did the wedding anniversary story. They claim it’s “irrelevant and unduly prejudicial.” The attorneys don’t even want jurors to see a picture of them together at Mar-a-Lago, which disproves claims that he never even met accusers like her.
Trump’s lawyers similarly want to exclude the recorded testimony of Leeds, the woman who says she was fondled by Trump on a flight some 45 years ago.
But notably, they also don’t want jurors to see what she looked like in 1978.
Because that would be “prejudicial,” too.
Carroll’s case against Trump is scheduled to go to trial in April, but the former president’s lawyers opened up a can of worms a few days ago when they floated the possibility of finally allowing her to test his DNA. For three years, Carroll has been trying to see if Trump’s DNA matches the human traces on the coat dress she wore on the day she claims he attacked her.
With several months to go, the judge has not yet decided what key questions will be presented during what’s expected to be a one-week trial.
