On Jan. 25, former President Donald Trump testified in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, but only briefly.
Leaving the courtroom, he said, “It’s not America; this is not America.”
President Trump’s testimony was preceded by a long exchange between defense attorney Alina Habba and U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, who wanted to know what the former president would be saying on the witness stand.
The judge emphasized that President Trump isn’t allowed to relitigate whether he sexually assaulted Ms. Carroll, because that matter was already settled by a jury trial last year.
During the exchange, President Trump spoke up, and the judge admonished him, saying, “Mr. Trump, you are disrupting these proceedings by talking loudly, and that is not permitted.”
Ms. Habba said she was glad that clips from President Trump’s 2022 deposition were played earlier, with his assertions that he didn’t know Ms. Carroll and that she wasn’t his “type,” because he wouldn’t be allowed to testify on that point.
Before President Trump testified, Judge Kaplan told the attorney: “Ms. Habba, I will decide what he has a right to do. That is my job, not yours.”
Ms. Habba was also asked to guarantee that she would ask President Trump whether he intended to incite people to harm Ms. Carroll with his statements.
It was a short testimony. President Trump answered, “No, I just wanted to defend myself, my family—” and intended to elaborate on his answer, but the judge struck from the record everything after the word “no.”
Previous Delays
The testimony had been delayed several times. The trial was initially supposed to span the week of Jan. 15, but President Trump was set to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral toward the end of the week and wouldn’t have been able to testify then.On Jan. 22, President Trump arrived in court expecting to testify, only to learn that the jury had been sent home because of health concerns and the need for COVID-19 testing. Jan. 23 marked the New Hampshire primary, and his attorneys requested that the trial be delayed another day; the judge later scheduled it to resume on Jan. 25.
Posting on Truth Social on the morning of Jan. 25, President Trump questioned whether he would be able to show a CNN interview with Ms. Carroll in court.
“Are we going to be able to show the CNN Anderson Cooper tape today which, among other things, totally exonerates me from a decades old False Accusation?” he wrote, referring to clips of the interview with Ms. Carroll that he has been sharing on social media throughout the trial. “This is a witch hunt conceived and funded by political operatives for purposes of election interference!!!”
President Trump has maintained that he has done nothing wrong, and he has argued both in and out of court that the several cases against him—many of which have culminated in trials coinciding with his 2024 campaign—are “election interference” on the part of his political opponent.
Several attempts to delay the defamation trial on the part of defense attorneys had been rejected by Judge Kaplan.
Other Testimonies
Video footage of President Trump being deposed in 2022—in which the former president denies knowing who Ms. Carroll is and calls her crazy—was played in court. He testified that he was the victim of a hoax and looked forward to suing Ms. Carroll and the attorney handling the deposition.President Trump said he shakes many hands, referring to a photograph taken of him, Ms. Carroll, and her husband in a photo line in New York, and didn’t remember the couple.
Roberta Myers, former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, was the first to take the witness stand. She confirmed that she is a Democrat and voted as such in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections. Ms. Myers testified about her relationship with Ms. Carroll, who wrote an advice column for the magazine that Ms. Myers said was so popular that other publications emulated it.
Ms. Habba asked the judge for a directed verdict in President Trump’s favor after the plaintiff’s side rested its case, arguing that Ms. Carroll failed to prove her case. The judge didn’t grant one.
Next, Francis Carol Martin, a retired journalist and friend of Ms. Carroll’s for 33 years, took the witness stand.
Ms. Habba read several text messages that Ms. Martin had sent during the period that Ms. Carroll had filed her lawsuits against President Trump, painting a picture of the plaintiff as someone who enjoyed the attention and sought out this spotlight.
Ms. Martin had sent multiple texts about Ms. Carroll, including one in which she likened Ms. Carroll to a drug addict, for whom the drug was “herself.”
Case Background
The case is one of two brought against President Trump by Ms. Carroll, dealing with accusations that she made in 2019 and his response.While President Trump was still in office, Ms. Carroll accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room sometime in the 1990s. He publicly denied the accusation in a statement and interview responses, while also claiming that he didn’t know who she was and suggesting that she was trying to gain publicity to sell her book.
Ms. Carroll sued President Trump for defamation in 2019 based on those statements. President Trump countersued, but the suit was denied.
The countersuit later became the rationale for an appeals court to deny a dismissal of the case based on presidential immunity, with the plaintiff arguing that President Trump had waived this immunity when he litigated the case.
In 2019, New York also passed the Adult Survivor Act, which would allow sexual abuse cases to be brought outside of the statute of limitations for a new period of one year. It was signed into law in 2022, and Ms. Carroll then sued President Trump in a second case accusing him of rape and defamation in new statements that he had made about her.
In May 2023, a jury awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million on this second case, finding that President Trump was liable for defamation and sexual battery instead of rape. Ms. Carroll then amended her first case to seek $10 million in damages based on the formula used in the first case to arrive at $5 million.
Judge Kaplan, presiding over both cases, then issued a summary judgment finding President Trump liable for defamation in the first case, stating that the facts were the same in both cases.
President Trump has said he will appeal the rulings in both cases.
