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10-05-2023
NEW YORK: A lawyer for a writer accusing Donald Trump of rape in a civil trial urged a jury to hold the ex-president liable for the alleged assault.
“No one, not even a former president, is above the law,” lawyer Roberta Kaplan said on Monday.
E Jean Carroll alleges Trump raped her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, which he denies.
In closing remarks in New York, Trump’s legal team accused Ms Carroll of “bringing a false claim”.
The nine-member jury are due to begin deliberations on Tuesday morning in the civil rape and defamation trial against the former president, after they receive instructions from US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is not related to Roberta Kaplan.
The jury has been hearing arguments over the past two weeks in a Manhattan federal court.
In their closing statement, Carroll’s attorneys focused on previous remarks Trump has made about women.
Ms Kaplan pointed to Trump’s controversial remarks in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape, which emerged publicly in 2016.
Referring to the comments, she said: “He kissed [women] without consent, he grabbed them, he did not wait.”
She argued the remarks had been a “playbook” for how he treated Carroll and other women.
Kaplan also said “self-blame” had kept Carroll from going to the police for decades.
In his closing statement, Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina focused on seeking to cast doubt on the details of Carroll’s story, which he at one point called “a work of fiction”.
He questioned why Carroll could not specify the date of the assault, arguing that stripped Trump of the chance to provide an alibi.
It was “not a coincidence” none of the witnesses Carroll had called could provide an exact date, he argued.
He also raised questions about the scene of the alleged assault, calling it “unbelievable” it could have occurred in a popular department store without any employees to witness it.
Tacopina argued the story had been “ripped from the pages of Law and Order SVU”, referring to a 2012 episode of the popular crime show in which a woman was raped in the lingerie department of a Bergdorf Goodman store.
Carroll has acknowledged her alleged assault occurred in the same place as the episode, which was released before she came forward with her allegation in 2019, but she said that was a coincidence. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
