Trump attorney Joe Tacopina is still trying to frame the details E. Jean Carroll describes of the alleged assault as implausible, repeatedly returning to Carroll’s testimony that she was able to eventually raise her knee to Trump’s thigh with her tights pushed down, that she didn’t scream and that she also gripped her purse throughout, while being pinned to the wall.
Tacopina sounded incredulous when he repeated back Carroll’s earlier testimony she had been wearing four-inch heels that day.
Carroll scoffed at Tacopina’s question: “I can dance forwards and backwards in four-inch heels.”
After a brief break, Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina picked up his cross examination by focusing on accuser E. Jean Carroll’s description of her reaction when she fled Bergdorf Goodman after the alleged assault and called her friend, author Lisa Birnbach.
“You could have easily called 911. And instead you called Lisa Birnbach,” Tacopina said, noting that Birnbach was not necessarily the closest friend to Carroll.
“She was exactly the person I needed to talk to,” Carroll said.
Carroll previously testified under direct examination Wednesday that she found Birnbach to be a warm and funny person and that it would help set her mind at ease if Birnbach heard Carroll’s account and found it funny — or at least wasn’t alarmed.
“I was going to tell her the story, which I thought was hilarious, and then I got to the point where I had to tell Lisa that he pulled down my tights, and before I said that, Lisa had to tell me to stop laughing,” Carroll said, describing her state of mind as “slightly disoriented” and said she had “adrenaline flowing through me.”
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan swatted down Tacopina’s effort to run with the interpretation of Carroll’s response that implied she finds rape “hilarious” and read the courtroom transcript back to him aloud, with punctuation. “Lisa Birnbach — funny, kind, warm — just telling me I had been raped … It’s hard to grasp what happened,” Carroll said.
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina’s next line of questioning is aiming to cast doubt on E. Jean Carroll’s account by underscoring there is no evidence like a police report or hospital record. Carroll testified to not calling police, seeing a doctor or going to the hospital and said her head and genitals still hurt by the time she returned home after the alleged assault.
“My vagina still hurt from his fingers,” she said.
Tacopina asked if she took the next day off from work, to which Carroll said she tried to resume life as normal.
“Right straight to work just to prove to myself that … life goes on, and that’s how I do it,” she said.
Carroll has testified that Birnbach encouraged her to tell the police about the assault, while a second friend she confided in, TV anchor Carol Martin, told her to stay silent, warning her Trump had “200 lawyers.”
“I was afraid Donald Trump [would] retaliate. And that’s exactly what he did. My worst nightmare came true,” Carroll said, looking over the courtroom. “He has two tables of lawyers here today.”
