- In an October 2022 deposition, Donald Trump claimed that E. Jean Carroll said “rape was sexy.”
- Trump misinterpreted Carroll’s comments about why he doesn’t like using the word rape in a 2019 interview.
- Carroll, who accused Trump of sexual assault, is suing him for defamation after he said she lied.
Former President Donald Trump claimed that E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexual assault, said “the rape was sexy” and “showed that she loved him” when he was fired in connection with her defamation suit in October.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan unsealed part of Trump’s testimony Friday after his lawyers lost a bid to keep it secret.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, sued Trump for defamation after he said she made up rape allegations about him to sell her memoir. He denies having any sexual contact with her.
In an October deposition, Trump misrepresented Carroll’s comments about the allegations in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“She actually showed that she liked it. Okay? She liked it until the commercial break. Actually, I think she said it was sexy, right? She said it was very sexy to be raped,” Trump said.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, then asked the former president, “So, sir, I just want to confirm: It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said she liked you sexually assaulting her?”
He replied, “Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what happened.”
Trump repeated several times the claim that Carroll described the rape as sexy and suggested that Cooper was “panicked” by her comments, so he called a commercial break.
In a 2019 interview, Carroll told Cooper that she doesn’t like using the word rape because it “carries so many sexual connotations” and that “most people find rape sexy” and “think about fantasies”.
By comparison, she said her encounter with the former president “wasn’t sexual. It just hurt.”
Carroll accused Trump of raping her in an article for New York Magazine in June 2019. She claimed he assaulted her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store on Fifth Avenue, in the mid-1990s.
Trump vehemently denied the claim, and in response Carroll sued him for defamation, claiming that calling her a liar had negatively affected her reputation and career.
During Trump’s often combative impeachment, which took place on October 19, 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, the former president called Carroll’s lawyer a “political operative” and a “disgrace” and threatened to sue her.