Former US President Donald Trump briefly testified to defend himself Thursday in the defamation trial filed in New York by author E. Jean Carroll, who had already had him convicted in 2023 for sexual assault in the 1990s and defamation .
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The businessman, on the strength of his victories in the Republican primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, is getting closer to a return match in the November presidential election against Joe Biden, but his testimony in court is strictly limited.
Dressed in a blue suit, remained silent or muttered in the morning, he testified only a few minutes in the afternoon, because Judge Lewis Kaplan restricted his freedom of speech and limited his lawyers’ questions to three , according to an AFP journalist.
Donald Trump could only answer yes or no to avoid any slippage, simply confirmed his testimony during the procedure and that he had wanted to defend himself from E’s rape accusations. John Carroll.
“She said something that I considered to be false,” he said before the judge cut him off.
“This is not America”
Leaving the courtroom, Donald Trump, visibly furious, shook his head in spite and said “this is not America”.
Since January 16, this civil trial has pitted E. Jean Carroll, 80 years old and former columnist for the American edition of Elle magazine, against Donald Trump, 77 years old. She has already had him sentenced in civil court in May 2023 to five million dollars in compensation for sexual assault in a fitting room of a New York department store in 1996 and, for the first time, for defamation for comments made in 2022.
Commuting for eight days between his campaign rallies in New Hampshire and the Manhattan courthouse, the former tenant of the White House, who dreams of returning there, was due to testify this week.
But his confrontation with E. Jean Carroll was postponed several times until this Thursday due to Covid among a juror on Monday and the New Hampshire Republican primary on Tuesday.
In the morning, the court watched excerpts from the first deposition by video link that Donald Trump made before the New York courts in October 2022 and in which he claimed not to know E. Jean Carroll, while repeating that she was “not (her) type” of woman.
In this deposition, when he was presented with an old photo of himself with the complainant, the septuagenarian confused her with his former wife, Marla Maples, before his lawyer corrected his mistake.
He also called E. Jean Carroll “a liar and a completely deranged person.”
Responsible
Wednesday evening, on his Truth Social platform, he launched no less than 37 written attacks against E. Jean Carroll, whom he has continued to denigrate and insult for months by calling her “crazy”, with the “history bogus”, which he has “never seen in (his) life”.
And this despite a first resounding verdict in May unanimously by a popular jury of the same New York civil federal court, judging him responsible for sexual assault and defamation.
Both sides called initial witnesses to the stand, including a retired television journalist and friend of E. Jean Carroll, Frances Carol Martin.
After this testimony, Donald Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, estimated that “Ms. Carroll had not provided evidence in her case. Final point”.
This second trial, which is not an appeal hearing, arises from a defamation complaint from the writer for statements by Donald Trump in June 2019, when she had accused him for the first time of rape in a book. Then President of the United States (2017-2021), he claimed that she had invented everything to “sell a new book”.
The procedure was delayed but this second trial was maintained and the plaintiff is claiming more than ten million dollars for moral and professional damage.
Donald Trump is also targeted, in this election year, by four criminal cases.
