A friend of E. Jean Carroll testified Tuesday that the former magazine columnist called her within minutes after being allegedly raped by Donald Trump in a New York department store in 1996, as the rape and defamation trial against the former president continues.
Lisa Birnbach recounted how Carroll called her minutes after leaving the department store and told her about the altercation in detail.
Birnbach said Carroll sounded “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional. Her voice was all kinds of things” when she called.
“He pulled down my tights, he pulled down my tights,” Carroll repeated on the phone, according to Birnbach. “Like she couldn’t believe it. She was still processing what happened to her. It had just happened to her.”
On the stand, Birnbach said she recalled she was feeding her young children in her kitchen at the time when Carroll called and walked out of the room to whisper “‘E. Jean he raped you. You should go to the police.’” Carroll described the altercation with Trump as a fight, she didn’t want to hear the word “rape,” Birnbach said.
“It sounded like a physical fight she tried to get free from him and she did not want me to say that word,” Birnbach testified. Carroll refused to go to the police and made her friend promise never to speak of it again.
After the phone call that lasted just a few minutes, the two never spoke about it again until 2019, according to Birnbach. “It was her life, her story, not my story. She clearly didn’t want to tell anybody what happened and I honored that.”
She never checked in with Carroll about how she was holding up, Birnbach added. “Well because I had made a promise to her not to bring it up not to discuss it and certainly not tell anybody so I put it – I buried it and as life went on it was easier to not think about it.”
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