Donald Trump's civil trial over alleged assault of E Jean Carroll begins

Former US president's legal issues could threaten 2024 run for second term in White House

Former president Donald Trump will not have to appear in court. AP

Former US president Donald Trump went on trial on Tuesday over a 30-year rape claim filed by a former advice columnist, with jurors in the civil case hearing her allegation of being attacked in a luxury department store dressing room.

The former president says nothing happened between them.

E Jean Carroll will give evidence that what unfolded in a few minutes in a fitting room in 1996 “would change her life for ever", one of her lawyers, Shawn Crowley, said in an opening statement.

“Filled with fear and shame, she kept silent for decades. Eventually, though, silence became impossible,” Mr Crowley said.

And when she broke that silence in a 2019 memoir, Mr Trump “used the most powerful platform on Earth to lie about what he had done, attack Ms Carroll’s integrity and insult her appearance”.

Trump's lawyer Joe Tacopina painted her story as wildly implausible and short of evidence, and called it “an affront to justice”.

He accused Ms Caroll of pursuing the case for money, status and political reasons.

“It all comes down to: Do you believe the unbelievable?” Mr Tacopina told the jury comprising six men and three women.

He urged the panel in heavily Democratic New York to put politics aside in considering the case against the former Republican president and New York resident.

“You can hate Donald Trump. That’s OK. But there’s a time and a secret place for that. It’s called a ballot box in an election," Mr Tacopina said.

"It’s not here in a court of law. Nobody’s above the law but no one is beneath it.”

US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered lawyers at the start of a civil trial to keep their clients and witnesses from making public statements that could lead to violence.

Mr Trump, who is facing a number of legal issues that could threaten his 2024 run for a second term in the White House, denies the allegations.

The start of the trial comes a few weeks after his historic arraignment on criminal charges related to an alleged hush-money payment made to an adult film star shortly before the 2016 election.

What is Trump accused of?

Ms Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, says she was raped by Mr Trump in the changing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

She said the attack came after Mr Trump asked her for shopping advice.

Ms Carroll first made the allegation in an excerpt from her book published by New York Magazine in 2019.

Mr Trump responded then by saying he never met her, that she was “not my type” and that she was “totally lying”.

Ms Carroll first sued Mr Trump for defamation in 2019 but was unable to include the rape claim because the statute of limitations for the alleged offence had expired.

But a new law took effect in New York in November last year that gives redress to victims of sexual assault decades after attacks may have occurred.

It gave sexual assault victims in the state a one-year window to sue their alleged abusers even when the abuse occurred long ago.

Lawyers for Ms Carroll filed a new suit that accused Mr Trump of battery “when he forcibly raped and groped” her.

It also included defamation for a post that he made on his Truth Social platform where he denied the alleged rape and referred to her as a “complete con job”.

The suit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for psychological harm, pain and suffering, loss of dignity and damage to her reputation.

Mr Trump is not expected to give evidence, as Ms Carroll's lawyers have said they do not intend to call him to the witness stand.

The trial is likely to last between one and two weeks.

Mr Trump became the first sitting or former president to be charged with a crime when he was arrested in the hush-money case this month.

He is also being investigated over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the southern state of Georgia, his alleged mishandling of classified documents taken from the White House, and any involvement in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

News agencies contributed to this report