Magazine Columnist E. Jean Carroll arrives for her civil trial against former President Donald Trump at Manhattan Federal Court on May 08, 2023 in New York City.
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images
A lawyer for writer E. Jean Carroll told jurors on Monday that Donald Trump followed a “playbook” he had for kissing and groping women without their consent before he raped Carroll in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
“You must hold him to account for what he’s done,” Carroll’s lawyer Robert Kaplan said. She delivered closing argument to jurors in U.S. District Court in Manhattan for a civil trial in which Trump, the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, is accused of battery and defaming the writer.
Kaplan showed jurors a snippet of the “Access Hollywood” tape, when Trump boasted in 2005 about touching women without their consent.
“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything,” Trump said on the tape, recorded for an appearance on that entertainment show.
Kaplan told jurors: “What is he doing here he is telling you in his own words his modus operandi, his MO…he kissed them without their consent.”
“The evidence shows overwhelmingly he followed this playbook and in the dressing room there grabbed [Carroll] by the p—y,” she said.
In his deposition in the case, Trump told Kaplan that “unfortunately or fortunately,” for “millions of years,” stars had been able to sexually grope women without asking permission first.
Former Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll watches as a former U.S. president Donald Trump’s video deposition is played in court during a civil trial where Carroll accuses the former U.S. president in a civil lawsuit of raping her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and of defamation, in New York, May 4, 2023 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
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