The trial that will decide how much money in damages Donald Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll resumes later this morning.
Carroll in her testimony last week recounted how Trump’s 2019 statements about her led to threatening messages and upended her sense of safety.
The attacks started “instantaneously,” Carroll said as she described several safety precautions she’s taken out of fear due to the threatening messages, including hiring security at both trials and keeping a gun at her bedside. “I bought bullets for the gun I had inherited from my father,” Carroll said.
Carroll’s voice broke as she described another violent message she received after the trial last year.
“When a woman sees the words, we can’t help but think of the image. And so, he wants me to stick a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger,” she said, reading the email. “And I imagine that many of us now can picture that.”
She said she was attacked on Twitter, Facebook, on new blogs and messages. “As I said, it was a new world. I had left the world of facts, a lovely world, and I was living in a new universe,” she said.
During cross-examination, Carroll testified there were about five hours between when her 2019 story published and when Trump made a statement denying the allegations, in response to questioning from Trump’s attorney Alina Habba. Carroll confirmed she received harassing social media messages before Trump made any statements.
Habba also pressed Carroll about deleting or removing the threatening messages when she received them, making a motion for a mistrial because of the deleted messages, which was promptly denied by Judge Lewis Kaplan. Habba argued in her opening statement last week that Carroll’s story fueled the harassment, not Trump’s denials.
