The writer E. Jean Carroll testified today in her defamation case against former President Trump, saying that his remarks about her “shattered” her reputation.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Former President Donald Trump went face-to-face with his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, in a New York courtroom today. Carroll is seeking damages against Trump for defamation stemming from when she went public with her account of a sexual attack in the mid-1990s. Today, she testified about the fallout from Trump’s repeated false assertion that she made up her story. NPR’s Andrea Bernstein was there. She’s on the line now from outside the courthouse. Hey there.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: OK, so we got to hear from Carroll on the stand today. What did she say?
BERNSTEIN: It was an extraordinary scene. Many women have accused Trump of sexual assault and then lying about them when they speak up. But here was a woman who Trump has verbally attacked, sitting just 30 feet away from him, detailing what he had said in the White House, at campaign rallies, on social media and on TV, and then describing how she received what she called a flood of slime from his supporters. And he sat there as Carroll’s lawyers displayed both his statements and the attacks on her by his supporters.
KELLY: And what exactly was her testimony?
BERNSTEIN: So this case is not about the sexual attack in a New York – a department store in the 1990s. Trump’s liability for that was established in an earlier trial last May. This case is about defamation, beginning just hours after Carroll published an excerpt from an upcoming book in June of 2019.
Carroll said she expected Trump to say the sex was consensual, not that it never happened, that he didn’t know her, that she was a liar, and that, quote, “people have to be careful because they are playing with very dangerous territory,” which is what he did say while president.
She described how, just hours after…
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