After days of speculation and anticipation, Donald Trump took the stand in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against him on Thursday. In the end, he testified for less than three minutes.
Under strict instructions by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, which barred Trump from denying that he sexually assaulted Carroll in the 1990s, Trump still attempted to bend the rules during questioning from his attorney Alina Habba, prompting a quick admonishment from Judge Kaplan. Habba asked if he stood by his testimony in his deposition, to which Trump answered, “100 percent.” She then asked if he considered Carroll’s accusation against him to be false.
“Yes, I did,” Trump said. “She said something that I considered a false accusation — totally false.”
Kaplan ordered his additional comment to be stricken from the court record. When asked whether he intended to hurt Carroll, Trump said no, but once again tried to subvert the judge’s limits, responding, “I just wanted to defend myself, my family and, frankly, the presidency.” Kaplan had that aside struck from the record as well.
Trump’s cross-examination by Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is unrelated to the judge, was even more brief. She asked Trump if this was the first trial he attended with Carroll as the defendant to which he simply answered, “Yes.”
With Trump likely to be the defense’s final witness, it was an anticlimactic end to a yearslong legal saga. In a 2019 New York cover story, Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump denied the allegation, claiming that he had never met her before. The former Elle columnist then sued Trump for defamation. Last May, the jury in the civil trial found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation. This trial will determine how much Trump will be ordered to pay Carroll in damages.
Before Trump’s testimony, the court heard from Robbie Myers, a former editor-in-chief of Elle, who called Carroll a “truth-teller” and said her work was integral to the magazine. Carroll’s legal team also played portions of Trump’s depositions, including a moment in which the former president was shown a photo of himself and Carroll and misidentified her as his second wife, Marla Maples. After Carroll’s attorneys rested their case, Trump’s team called Carol Martin, a friend of Carroll who previously testified in the first trial.
Trump has been attacking Carroll on his online platform, Truth Social, since the trial began, escalating his broadsides as his testimony approached. The day before he took the stand, the former president sought to undermine Carroll’s credibility by resurfacing old social-media posts of hers. “THIS IS A FALSE ACCUSATION FORCED INTO THE PUBLIC EYE BY DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES LIKE HER LAWYER, HER FUNDERS, AND OTHERS. LOOK AT HER MANY CRAZY TWEETS, THEY SAY IT ALL — Another HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia,” he wrote in one post. Carroll’s legal team submitted several of Trump’s Truth Social posts disparaging their client into the record.
With Trump’s brief testimony complete, the defense rested its case with closing arguments slated for Friday. As he made his exit from the courtroom, Trump loudly aired his frustration.
“It’s not America. It’s not America. This is not America,” he said.
