E. Jean Carroll acknowledges that there are two different versions of herself: the empowered and resilient advice columnist who’s always doing “fabulous,” and the self-effacing writer who says she’s never recovered from her alleged rape at the hands of Donald Trump.
The former president’s lawyer spent Monday morning cross-examining Carroll to expand the divide between them both, flipping through her messages and TV appearances to portray her as an attention-seeking journalist who reveled in the spotlight after accusing Trump of a heinous crime.
It’s a clear attempt to lean into the very defenses Trump—who is not present at his own trial—has raised publicly: that Carroll’s accusation is a political swipe and an attempt to get a payout.
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Trump’s lawyers zeroed in on the way Carroll testified last week that her life is in shambles ever since she went public in 2019, despite her repeated comments that she’s been doing great.
“I always say my life is fabulous,” Carroll responded on the stand.
“Except in this courtroom,” defense lawyer Joe Tacopina shot back.
Carroll, who acknowledged the irreconcilable differences between her public persona and private self, explained that the difference is that, in court, “I have to tell the truth.”
So when you go on television and podcasts, Tacopina exclaimed, “they’re all lies?”
Jurors already saw Carroll’s emotional testimony about how Trump allegedly attacked her inside the fitting room inside the luxury Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman sometime around 1996.
Monday marks the second full day that Carroll was questioned by Trump’s lawyer, a cross-examination that only intensified as it went on.
On Thursday, Tacopina spent considerable time probing an odd email between Carroll and a friend where they discussed the need to stop Trump—and said they had a “scheme” in mind. He also repeatedly questioned why Carroll didn’t scream when the alleged rape took place, or why there was no one around to witness the incident.
The civil trial, which threatens to brand Trump a rapist and could cost him millions, resumed this week. Jurors got a much wider view of the fight between Carroll and Trump, with the former president’s legal team playing TV news clips that showed how Carroll described the encounter during live interviews. Jurors also heard more about other traumatic incidents in Carroll’s life, with Trump’s lawyers probing why Carroll never told police about the way disgraced former CBS Chairman Les Moonves kissed and groped her in an elevator—and other instances of sexual misconduct by other men.
“I was born in 1943. I am a member of the silent generation,” Carroll said on the stand. “The fact that I never went to the police is not surprising for someone my age.”
Tacopina responded by bringing up how Carroll had reached out to police when kids damaged a mailbox at a historic home she was staying at on Halloween.
“So you’ll call the cops on a mailbox, but not if you’re personally attacked or sexually assaulted?” Tacopina asked.
Her responses—and the questions Trump’s lawyer keeps asking her—serve as examples of how this trial has become a showdown for the national reckoning that started with the #MeToo movement, which Carroll said inspired her to come forward.
Trump’s lawyer also noted that Carroll never sued Moonves, forcing the writer to draw a distinction between Moonves’ denial—on the record in New York magazine—versus Trump’s “she's not my type” comments from the White House. Tacopina framed both as men calling her a liar, while Carroll countered that Trump’s response was far worse.
Tacopina presented a clip from her deposition in October in which she said she thought Trump “would just say it didn’t happen that way… that it was consensual.”
Another Trump lawyer who questioned Carroll during that testimony, Alina Habba, asked if that would have essentially counted as him calling her a liar too. Carroll said no.
The day took an odd turn when Trump's legal team drew the jury's attention to the fact that, in 2012, the TV show "Law & Order: SVU" aired an episode with uncanny similarities. It dealt with the idea of a rape in a changing room at the lingerie department of none other than Bergdorf's.
Tacopina presented the courtroom with an email that Carroll got immediately after she went public with her own accusation against Trump, one from a friendly reader who warned that Carroll's story sounded very similar to TV fiction that aired five years earlier.
"Trumpsters will use against you," the reader wrote.
"I'm surprised this sort of plot is not seen more often," Carroll responded.
Tacopina, sounding incredulous, repeatedly asked Carroll to explain the eerie parallels.
"I hadn't seen it, and I have yet to see it," she said on the stand. "It's amazing."
"Amazing coincidence?" Tacopina replied.
"Yes, it's astonishing," Carroll said.
When questioned by her own lawyers, Carroll stressed that she didn't make up details based on a TV show.
As Tacopina's questions wore on, the federal judge overseeing the trial felt compelled to keep coming to her rescue, sometimes stopping Trump's lawyer dead in his tracks and not even waiting for Carroll's team to object. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan sternly lectured Tacopina on his line of questioning, particularly when the gruff Brooklynite seemed to flip a switch and go into attack mode.
When Tacopina revisited the many reasons Carroll gave for failing to scream during her encounter with Trump—too much adrenaline, his chest was in the way, she feared making a scene—Kaplan cut him off.
"You understand that is not an appropriate line of questioning," the judge interjected.
Carroll's legal team tried to highlight the offensive tones of the Trump team's questions. Her lawyer, Michael Ferrara, teed it up when he asked Carroll why Tacopina's questions affected her so.
"It was startling to me that in 2023 a woman would be asked if she would scream," Carroll responded.
