At first she thought it would just be funny to help Donald Trump buy a gift of women’s lingerie in a luxury department store.

Even when, according to E. Jean Carroll, the then-businessman beckoned her into a locker room as they challenged each other to try on a see-through bodysuit, she imagined something like a Saturday Night Live skit she’d written.

But soon my only reason for being alive at the time was to get out of that room, Carroll testified Wednesday at her rape trial trial.

I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and destroyed my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back, Carroll told the jurors.

While taking the stand to describe the alleged 1996 attack, Trump reiterated from a distance that he stressed that Carroll’s claim is utter fiction. The former president writes this on his social media site

Truth Social,

that the case is a fabricated scam, and more.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

His comments prompted the judge to warn Trump’s lawyers that he could get himself into more legal trouble.

I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen.”

Trump has not yet attended the trial, but his lawyers said Tuesday he could still decide to testify.

The trial comes as Trump once again seeks the Republican nomination for president, and weeks after he pleaded not guilty to unrelated criminal charges involving payments made to silence a porn actor who said she had a sexual encounter with him.

This is a fraudulent and false story Witch Hunt!

Carroll, 79, testified that she ran into Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman revolving door on an unspecified Thursday night in the spring of 1996. At the time, she was writing a long-running advice column for Elle magazine, having also written for SNL. Trump was a New York real estate magnate and social figure.

She said he asked her advice on choosing a gift for a woman and she was happy to do so. As an advice columnist, having Trump ask for gift guidance was a great prospect, and Carroll thought she’d end up with a funny story, she said.

She tested to see if she suggested a hat, but he turned to lingerie, and soon they were chatting about the bodysuit. Amused and flirting with him, she went along, laughing even when he closed the door to the changing room, maybe even when he pushed her against a wall.

But then, she claims, Trump stomped his mouth on hers, yanked down her tights, and pushed his hand and then his penis into her as she wrestled against him.

She said she eventually knelt off him, fled, and blamed herself for years.

“I always think back to why I walked in there to put myself in that situation,” she said in a cracking voice.

Carroll said she didn’t tell anyone except two friends for decades because she was afraid Trump would retaliate, because she thought it was my fault and because she thought a lot of people blame rape victims for what happened to them. happened to them.

The alleged attack took place long before the #MeToo movement forced a reckoning with how victims of sexual assault are treated by law enforcement and the public. Carroll has said that #MeToo fueled her decision to come forward in a 2019 memoir and accompanying magazine excerpt.

The 76-year-old Trump said he was not in the store with Carroll and had no idea who she was when she first aired the story publicly.

As court was about to begin on Wednesday, Trump expressed his feelings about the case on Truth Social.

Among his other comments, he called Carroll’s attorney a political agent and alluded to a DNA issue that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan says is not part of the case.

Lawyers for Carroll whose lawsuit includes allegations that Trump has previously defamed her by publicly calling her case a “hoax,” “scam,” lie, and full scam, have reported his new statement to Kaplan.

He was not happy when he said Trump seemed to be addressing his supporters and the jury “about things that shouldn’t be talked about.” Kaplan called Trump’s post “a public statement that on the surface seems completely inappropriate.”

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina noted that jurors are being told not to monitor any news or online commentary about the case. But he said he would ask Trump “to refrain from further reporting on this matter.

“I hope you have more success,” Kaplan said, adding that Trump may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability.

Carroll’s federal lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages and a retraction of his alleged defamatory remarks.

Carroll said she hasn’t even been able to show a guy I liked him since her alleged meeting with Trump.

Although mostly businesslike during her testimony, she cried and wiped her eyes with a tissue as she described the gulf between her “invincible public persona and a private self that “cannot admit aloud that there is any suffering has been.

The lawsuit was filed under a New York law that allows decades-old claims of sexual abuse to temporarily go to civil court.

she rolls

never faced criminal charges, although they advised her

own

readers to tell the police and get therapy if they had been sexually assaulted.

Trump’s attorney has alleged that Carroll filed a lawsuit to get money and politically punish Trump. Carroll, a registered Democrat, testified that she voted for his Democratic opponents in 2016 and 2020, but said it has nothing to do with her lawsuit.

I’m not making a political score at all. I settle a personal score,” she said.

The Associated Press usually doesn’t name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.