Earlier in the day, a New York civil court jury retired to deliberate whether former US President Donald Trump committed a 1996 rape or sexual assault on a former journalist, who also accused him of defamation.
After two weeks of trial, where Donald Trump did not come to testify in Manhattan federal court, Judge Lewis Kaplan gave his instructions for more than an hour to nine jurors, six men and three women. They will have to decide whether the plaintiff, the former columnist of the magazine “Elle” E. Jean Carroll, demonstrated that Donald Trump had raped her, sexually assaulted her, or had forced her to touch her without her consent, in a dressing room. of a New York department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in the spring of 1996. Charges disputed by Donald Trump, who intends to regain the White House in 2024.
E. Jean Carroll came out of silence in 2019 in a book, where she accused Donald Trump, then President of the United States, for the first time.
She had initially filed a complaint for defamation, because he had accused her of lying to sell his work. Then, last November, she filed a lawsuit for rape, thanks to a new law in the State of New York allowing alleged victims to sue in civil justice even for potentially prescribed facts.
