‘I’m here because Trump raped me’: E. Jean Carroll begins trial testimony

Judge Kaplan suggested to Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina that the former president could risk being sued or having sanctions imposed for the Truth Social posts he issued Wednesday morning.

“We are getting into in area in which your client could face a new liability and I think you know what I mean,” Kaplan said in Manhattan federal court.

Trump, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has not appeared in the courtroom since jury selection began Tuesday. It is not clear that he will attend the trial on any day.

The former president denies raping Carroll. He also argues he did not defame her in comments he made last fall, when he said her claim was a hoax, and that she had changed her account of the alleged attack during an interview with CNN.

In his first Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump wrote, “The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM. Her lawyer is a political operative, financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that.”

“Just look at her CNN interview before after the commercial break – Like a different person,” Trump wrote, referring to an interview Carroll gave CNN about the lawsuit.

He continued: “She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky “stuff”, then she didn’t want to produce it. The dress should be allowed to be part of the case. This is a fraudulent false story–Witch Hunt!”

Trump wrote a second post echoing those themes, and wrote “Does anybody believe that I would take a then almost 60 year old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a very crowded department store, (with me being very well known, to put it mildly!), into a tiny dressing room, and …. her. She didn’t scream? There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this?”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/trump-lawyer-blasted-for-e-jean-carroll-social-media-attack.html