Donald Trump has said he intends to testify at a second defamation hearing concerning E. Jean Carroll, currently set to commence on January 16th. The 80-year-old advice columnist alleges the former president raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City in either 1995 or 1996.
Trump says he regrets not having testified during the first hearing, with jurors in the civil case reaching a contradictory decision that he had not raped Carroll, as she alleged, but that he had sexually abused her. She was awarded $5 million in damages, despite the fact she could not even remember the year of the alleged incident and could provide no physical evidence that it actually took place.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, bizarrely ruled that Trump had raped the writer, despite the jury finding he had not.
“I’m going to testify,” Trump told The New York Times, explaining he had been talked out of doing so at the first hearing.
A spokeswoman for Carroll said she “looks forward to presenting her case to a jury whose only job will be to determine how much in additional damages she will be entitled to receive.”
Carroll has made many accusations of rape and sexual assault over the years, also claiming to have been attacked by a boy aged seven or eight when she was also a child, a babysitter’s boyfriend, a camp counselor, a dentist, a college date whose name she could not remember, an unnamed former boss, and CBS chief executive Les Moonves.
She never reported any of her alleged attackers to the police, instead taking to CNN to describe how rape is “sexy”.
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