E Jean Carroll is taking on Donald Trump in court over alleged 1990s rape in department store
The civil rape trial against former President Donald Trump, brought by a once-prominent columnist, began Tuesday in a New York courtroom, nearly 30 years after the alleged assault and four years after the author went public with her story.
DailyMail.com is here to answer all your questions as E. Jean Carroll, 79, takes on the presidential hopeful over claims he raped her in a luxury department store locker room in the late 1990s.
Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations, insisting that Carroll only raised the allegations to promote sales of her 2019 memoir What Do We Need Men For?
It remains unclear whether the presidential candidate will testify in the case, which is expected to last at least a week, with the jury being sworn in on Tuesday.
E Jean Carroll, 79, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, has said she was silent about her experience for decades, but spoke out after Trump, 76, became president
The panel of six men and three women will decide whether the former president sexually assaulted journalist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. E. Jean Carroll and Judge Kaplan are featured in a court sketch
Who is E. Jean Carroll?
Elizabeth Jean “Jeannie” Carroll had long been a luminary on the New York literary scene.
Born in Detroit, she grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where she began pitching story ideas to magazines at the age of 12.
After graduating from Indiana University, Carroll got her first big break when she published an article in Esquire, which she later described as a “witty literary quiz” she made up about Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
From there, she says, the writing assignments “started to trickle in,” and in 1983 she was sent to New York City to interview Fran Leibowitz for a cover story in Outside magazine.
Carroll was in love with the city and then decided to leave her then-husband, Steve Byers, and move to the Big Apple.
“I had jeans, cowboy boots, a fringed jacket, a few shirts,” she shared USA today. ‘And that’s it.’
She began writing first-person articles for Playboy and New York magazines, and was even hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live – for which she earned a 1987 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program.
But she was best known for her advice column Ask E. Jean, which ran on Elle from 1993 to 2019.
A common theme in the advice column was that women should ‘never’ organize their lives around men.
Carroll was a featured advice columnist for Elle Magazine before she was fired in 2019
She claimed in a memoir that year that the then president had raped her in the mid-1990s
What does she claim happened?
At the height of her fame, in the mid-1990s, Carroll claimed in her memoir, she met Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue.
She described in the 2019 book how Trump asked her for help picking out a gift for “a girl,” and he offered to buy her lingerie.
But, she said, the “playful banter took a dark turn” when he followed her into the locker room and raped her.
According to her complaint, “Trump lunged at Carroll, shoved her against the wall, hit her head pretty hard and put his mouth on her lips.
Carroll pushed him back. Utterly shocked by Trump’s unexpected attack, Carroll burst into awkward laughter. She could barely process the madness of the situation. She also hoped, at least at first, that laughter would hurt his ego and make him withdraw.’
Instead, he reportedly “grabbed both of her arms” and pinned her against the wall as he pulled down her tights and reportedly forced himself on her.
An investigation by the New York Times later confirmed her version of events, with some sources close to the columnist describing how she told them about the rape after it happened.
The case brought by Carroll was filed under a New York state law that gave adult victims of sexual assault one year to file civil suits after the statute of limitations expires.
Donald Trump in 1987 with his first wife, Ivana, rape prosecutor E. Jean Carroll and Carroll’s then-husband
Trump was said to have been married to Marla Maples at the time of the alleged rape. Maples gave birth to daughter Tiffany (above) in 1993
Why else is she suing Trump?
Carroll filed a separate defamation lawsuit against Trump over statements he made on the matter while he was president.
His social media posts include calling the case a “complete scam” and “totally untrue.”
In one post, he said, “While I’m not supposed to say it, I do. This woman is not my type.’
She believes the fallout from her allegations – which were only first published in her memoir – led Elle to fire her in December 2019.
She said in a tweet that she was fired “because Trump made fun of my reputation, laughed at my appearance and dragged me through the mud.”
“I don’t blame Elle,” she continued. “It has been the great honor of my life to write Ask E. Jean. I blame Donald Trump.”
The magazine has denied that the early termination of her contract had anything to do with the allegations.
In a separate lawsuit, Carroll is accusing Trump of defamation for comments he made after she came forward with her accusations
How has Trump responded?
Trump called his rape accuser, E. Jean Carroll, “mentally ill” and “crazy” in an unsealed statement.
According to the transcript, Trump said under oath, “She said I did something to her that never happened. There was nothing. I don’t know anything about that madman.’
In another section, the 2024 presidential candidate said, “I don’t know anything about her. I think she’s sick, mentally ill.’ Trump repeated his claim that Carroll was “not his type.”
The deposition took place in October 2022.