NEW YORK — Less than a year after convincing a jury that former President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her decades ago, writer E. Jean Carroll will take the stand again to describe how his verbal attacks affected her after she came forward.
Carroll is scheduled to testify Wednesday in the second federal civil trial over her claims against Trump, all of which she denies. Because the first jury found that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her in 2022, the new trial is only about how much more — if anything — he will have to pay her for some other comments. He made them while he was president.
Trump, who is combining court appearances with campaign stops as he leads the Republican field in this year’s presidential race, took part in jury selection on Tuesday. Before opening statements began, he left for a rally in New Hampshire.
He said on social media on Tuesday that the case was nothing more than “fabricated lies and political tricks” that had earned his accuser money and fame.
“I am the only one hurt by this extortion attempt,” read a post on his Truth Social platform.
But Carroll, an advice columnist and magazine writer, has said Trump has deeply damaged her. First, she claims, he forced himself on her in a dressing room after a chance encounter at a luxury department store in 1996. Then he publicly questioned her honesty, her motives and even her sanity after she publicly told the story in a 2019 memoir.
“He repeatedly called me a liar, and it really decimated my reputation. I am a journalist. The only thing I need is the trust of the readers,” she testified in April during the first trial. “I am no longer believed.”
Carroll has insisted she has lost millions of readers and her longtime gig at Elle magazine, where her advice column “Ask E. Jean” ran for more than a quarter century, because of her accusations and Trump’s response to them. Elle has said that her contract was not renewed for unrelated reasons.
One of Carroll’s attorneys, Shawn Crowley, said in her opening statement that the writer also received violent threats from Trump supporters.
Trump attorney Alina Habba countered that Carroll wanted to hold the former president accountable for “some mean tweets from Twitter trolls.” He was “only defending himself” in his comments about his accuser, Habba said in her opening statement.
Trump claims that nothing ever happened between him and Carroll, and that he never even met her. There is a 1987 celebratory photo of them and their then-husbands, but Trump says it was a temporary greeting that “doesn’t count.”
Trump did not attend the previous trial in the case last May, when a jury found he had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages. However, the jury found that Carroll had not proven her claim that Trump raped her.
Carroll is now seeking $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in additional damages.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
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Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.