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“I’m just going to ask that Mr Trump take special care to keep his voice down when conferring with counsel to make sure the jury does not hear it,” Kaplan said before jurors returned to the courtroom after a morning break.
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Earlier, without the jury in the courtroom, Trump could be seen slamming his hand on the defence table and uttering the word, “man”, when the judge again refused his lawyer’s request that the trial be suspended on Thursday so he could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in Florida.
Carroll, 80, was the first witness in a Manhattan federal court trial to determine damages, if any, that Trump owes her for remarks he made while he was president in June 2019 as he vehemently denied ever attacking her or knowing her. A jury last year already found that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 and defamed her when he made a round of denials in October 2022.
Carroll’s appearance was somewhat of a tightrope walk because of limitations the judge has posed on the trial in light of the previous verdict and prior rulings he’s made restricting the infusion of political talk into the proceedings.
Habba lobbed multiple objections seeking to prevent the jury from hearing details of Carroll’s sexual assault allegations.
“I’ve paid just about as dearly as it’s possible to pay,” Carroll said, referencing the damage she said Trump had caused to her reputation.
She said that Trump’s vitriol towards her had not ceased, pointing to multiple social media posts he made about her in recent days, and that his rhetoric continued to inspire venom against her from strangers because she claimed he sexually abused her decades ago.
“He lied last month. He lied on Sunday. He lied yesterday. And I am here to get my reputation back,” Carroll said.
She said she opened a social media website on Tuesday and saw a post that said: “Hey lady, you’re a fraud”.
Carroll said her worries about her personal safety after a stream of death threats led her to buy bullets for a gun she inherited from her father, install an electronic fence, warn her neighbours of threats and unleash her pit bull to roam freely on the property of the small cabin in the mountains of upstate New York where she lives alone.
She also brought security along for the trial this week and last May and said she’d thought often about hiring security more often to accompany her.
“Why don’t you?” her attorney, Roberta Kaplan – no relation to the judge – asked.
“Can’t afford it,” Carroll answered.
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She took the stand after a hostile encounter between Habba and the judge – culminating in Trump’s desk slam – over the judge’s refusal to adjourn the trial on Thursday.
Habba called the judge’s ruling “insanely prejudicial” and the judge soon afterwards cut her off, saying he would “hear no further argument on it”.
Habba told the judge: “I will not be spoken to that way, your honour.” When she mentioned the funeral again, the judge responded: “It’s denied. Sit down. Bring in the jury.”
Afterwards, Trump ripped the judge in brief remarks to reporters at an office building he owns near the courthouse. He called the Bill Clinton appointee “a nasty judge” and a “Trump-hating guy” echoing his own social media posts that Kaplan was “seething and hostile” and “abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial.”
Trump has made similar comments about the judge in another case: a state of New York lawsuit accusing him of inflating his property values to get better rates on insurance and loans.
Carroll’s testimony came nine months after she was in the same chair convincing a jury in the hopes that Trump could be held accountable in a way that would stop him from frequent verbal attacks against her as he campaigns for the presidency. He is the front-runner on the Republican ticket and won this week’s Iowa caucuses.
“I’m here because Donald Trump assaulted me and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened. He lied and shattered my reputation,” she said.
Once, Carroll testified, she was a respected advice columnist. “Now, I’m known as the liar, the fraud and the whack job.”
Because the first jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her in 2022, the new trial concerns only how much more – if anything – he’ll be ordered to pay her for other remarks he made in 2019 while he was president.
Trump, who is juggling court appearances with campaign stops, sat in on jury selection on Tuesday. Before opening statements began, he left for a New Hampshire rally.
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He declared on social media on Tuesday that the case was nothing but “fabricated lies and political shenanigans” that had garnered his accuser money and fame.
“I am the only one injured by this attempted EXTORTION,” read a post on his Truth Social platform.
Carroll has said that Trump harmed her deeply. First, she claims, he forced himself on her in a dressing room after a chance meeting at a luxury department store in 1996. Then he publicly impugned her honesty, her motives and even her sanity after she told the story publicly in a 2019 memoir.
Carroll has maintained she lost millions of readers and her long-time post at Elle magazine, where her “Ask E. Jean” advice column ran for over a quarter of a century, because of her allegations and Trump’s reaction to them. Elle has said her contract wasn’t renewed for unrelated reasons.
Trump asserts that nothing ever happened between him and Carroll and that he never met her. He says a 1987 party photo of them and their then-spouses “doesn’t count” because it was a momentary greeting.
Trump did not attend the previous trial in the case last May, when a jury found he had sexually abused and defamed Carroll and awarded her $US5 million ($7.6 million) in damages. The jury said, however, that Carroll hadn’t proven her claim that Trump raped her.
Carroll is now seeking $US10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages.
AP
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