Former US President Donald Trump denied having raped the writer E. Jean Carrollpresenting video testimony Wednesday as part of his defense before a federal jury in Manhattan, where he faces a civil trial that he avoided going in person.
Trump, front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said in the statement dated October 2022 that the alleged rape in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City decades ago did not happen.
“This is the most ridiculous and disgusting story,” Trump said in the video, hunched over a conference table as Carroll’s lawyers presented him with documents. “It’s just made up.”
Although footage of the statement was not released, parts of the transcript have been released publicly.
Trump will not testify in person and his legal team told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan Wednesday that no witnesses will be called.
The trial is in its sixth day and is expected to last until next week.
Carroll’s civil suit for assault and defamation alleges that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s and then tarnished his reputation by claiming in an October 2022 post on his Truth Social platform that the case of the former Elle magazine columnist was a “hoax and a lie”.
Carroll said during three days of testimony and cross-examination that Trump hit her against a wall in 1995 or 1996, stuck his fingers into her vagina and then inserted his penis.
Denying the allegations, Trump accused Carroll of fabricating the story to boost sales of a 2019 memoir in which he made his claims public.
Trump has not attended the trial.
“I hear we’re doing very well in New York,” Trump said Wednesday when asked why he wasn’t in court. He spoke to reporters in Scotland where he was playing golf.
The trial has also featured testimony from two women who say Trump sexually assaulted them decades ago.
Former People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff told jurors Wednesday that Trump cornered her at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2005 and forcibly kissed her for “a few minutes” until a butler interrupted the alleged abuse. .
“It really had a profound effect on me,” Stoynoff said through tears, describing the intense shame and self-doubt she said she felt after the encounter.
Another woman, Jessica Leeds, testified Tuesday that Trump kissed her, groped her and ran his hand up her skirt on a flight in 1979.
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