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WARNING: This article contains details and allegations of sexual assault and may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
Closing arguments are expected Monday after former U.S. president Donald Trump rejected his last chance to testify at a civil trial in which a longtime advice columnist accuses him of raping her in a luxury department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Trump, a Republican candidate for president in 2024, was given until 5 p.m. ET Sunday by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to file a request to testify. No such filing occurred.
On Thursday, Kaplan had given Trump extra time to change his mind and request to testify, though the judge did not promise he would grant such a request to reopen the defence case so Trump could take the stand.
Kaplan noted that he’d heard about news reports Thursday in which Trump told reporters while visiting his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, that he would “probably attend” the trial.
“I’ll be going back early because a woman made a claim that was totally false, it was fake,” Trump said in Ireland.
Trump was not present during the two-week Manhattan trial where writer E. Jean Carroll testified for several days, repeating claims of sexual assault she first made publicly in a 2019 memoir.
Trump was not required to be in attendance. He left for his European trip after the start of the trial, the date of which has been known for several weeks.
Carroll is seeking compensatory and punitive damages totalling millions of dollars.
Jury deliberations are expected to take place this week.
Violent encounter, Carroll alleges
On the witness stand, Carroll, 79, testified that Trump, 76, raped her in spring 1996 — she has been unsure of the precise date — after they met at the entrance of the midtown Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman.
She said the encounter began as a fun and flirtatious outing as Trump coaxed her into helping him shop for a gift for another woman. She said they ended up in the store’s desolate lingerie section, where they teased each other to try on a see-through bodysuit.
As Carroll recalled it, laughter accompanied them into a dressing room where Trump became violent, slamming her up against a wall, pulling aside her tights and raping her before she kneed him and fled the store.
The jury has also watched lengthy excerpts from an October videotaped deposition in which Trump vehemently denied raping Carroll or ever really knowing her.
In his deposition, Trump said Carroll made it up. He called it “a false, disgusting lie” delivered by a “nut job” who was trying to stoke sales of her book.
He also repeated comments he made in statements that she was not his “type.”
“She’s not my type and that’s 100 per cent true,” he said.
Repeats Access Hollywood claim
And he repeated his claims in a 2005 Access Hollywood video in which he bragged that men who are celebrities can grab women by the genitals without asking.
“Historically that’s true with stars,” he said.
“If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” he said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”
When the Access Hollywood recording came to light in October 2016, Trump downplayed it during a presidential debate as “locker-room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago.”
Carroll sued Trump in November, minutes after New York state enacted a law allowing adult sexual assault victims to sue others even if the attacks occurred decades earlier.
Two women were also called to testify by Carroll’s team regarding their own allegations, including Canadian journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who testified that in 2005 Trump forcibly kissed her against her will while showing her around his Florida home while she was on assignment for People magazine.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote a letter to the judge Sunday to complain that Trump still has not removed April 26 posts on his social media network in which he called Carroll’s allegations “a made up SCAM.” And she noted that he repeated disparaging remarks about the trial three days ago in Ireland.
After the April 26 postings on Truth Social, Judge Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll’s lawyer, said Trump’s comments were “highly inappropriate” and expressed concern that Trump was trying to communicate to the jury “about stuff that has no business being spoken about.”
The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
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