In her lawsuit trial, E. JeanCarroll testified that Trump raped her

It was a joke, but he didn’t,” wrote a writer suing Donald Trump in a department store fit-room

NEW YORK — A writer suing Donald Trump took the stand Wednesday to tell jurors that the future president raped her after she accompanied him into a department store fitting room in 1996.

Donald Trump said that it didn’t happen when I wrote about it. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back,” she testified.

Trump denied E. JeanCarroll’s allegations. He hasn’t been to the trial yet, but his lawyers said it was still possible he would testify.

Trump, 76, has said he wasn’t at the store with Carroll and had no clue who she was when she first aired the story publicly in a 2019 memoir and accompanying magazine excerpt. In a post on his social media site Wednesday, he called the case a “made up scam.”

She says he asked her advice about selecting a gift for a woman and she went along, thinking the experience would be funny. According to Carroll, they ended up in a lingerie department, joked with each other about who should try on a bodysuit and went to a dressing room.

Carroll said Trump slammed her against a wall, yanked down her tights and raped her before she kneed him and fled. She never pursued criminal charges and said she would have kept the accusation secret forever if not for the #MeToo movement, which empowered women to speak up in the wake of sexual assault claims against former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017.

The case of Donald J. Weinstein: a “made up SCAM” and “no further posts” about Trump’s trial on social media

In other developments, the judge said Trump made an “entirely inappropriate” online statement about the trial and warned the former president’s lawyers that he could bring more legal problems upon himself.

On Wednesday, Trump launched a counterattack against the trial on social media, telling followers on his Truth Social platform that the case was “a made up SCAM” and that her lawyer is a political operative.

The jurors are not allowed to follow any online commentary or news about the case. But he said he would ask Trump “to refrain from any further posts about this case.”

The trial comes as Trump again seeks the Republican nomination for president, and weeks after he pleaded not guilty to unrelated criminal charges that involve payments made to silence a porn actor who said she had a sexual encounter with him.

Tacopina promised to delve deeper into Carroll’s alleged encounter with Trump, in a dressing room at luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman, in what could end up being several days of cross-examination.

On the day that the Weinstein allegations came to light, Carroll said she was going to be reporting on women who stood up to men who behaved in ways that were sexual in nature. The cultural shift caused her to reveal what Trump had done to her, she said.

“The light dawned,” she said. The groundswell of women speaking about sexual assault made me realize that staying silent does not work and has a chance of limiting the harm.

Kaplan vowed not to appear at the trial of Donald Trump in a case related to a sexual assault assault against a woman in New York

Trump, who is scheduled to hold a campaign event Thursday in Manchester, New Hampshire, is not expected to appear at the trial. He gave a videotaped deposition in the case.

“What seems to be the case is that your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his ‘public,’ but, more troublesome, to the jury in this case about stuff that has no business being spoken about,” the judge observed.

Kaplan warned that “we are getting into an area in which your client may or maynot be tampering with a new source of potential liability”, after he promised to speak with Trump.

The trial results from a lawsuit Carroll filed in November after the state of New York enacted a law allowing adult victims of sexual assault to sue their attackers even if the assault occurred decades earlier.

In her testimony, she claimed that writing about her encounter with Trump in her memoir caused her to be fired from her job as an advice columnist for 27 years, and led to her buying firearms because of her death threats.

She said a look at the social media she used showed that people thought she was a liar and a slut.