* Carroll says Trump raped her at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s * ‘I accused Trump of sexual assault. Now I sleep with a loaded gun’E Jean Carroll in New York.
Photograph: Chris Buck/The GuardianE Jean Carroll, the widely respected
New York journalist who alleges
Donald Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, is suing the president for defamation after he ridiculed her claim on the grounds she was “not my type”.Carroll, 75, filed her lawsuit in the supreme court of New York state on Monday. She argues that Trump’s vociferous denials and characterisation of her as a money-grabbing liar have damaged her reputation and career.In the suit, the writer repeats her allegation that about 23 years ago at the upscale store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Trump seized her, forced her against the wall of a dressing room and raped her. The suit notes that Carroll remained silent for more than two decades about the incident, though she says she told two close friends at the time.One of the friends, the journalist Lisa Birnbach, told the New York Times that she replied to Carroll: “E Jean, he raped you. If he penetrated you that was rape. Let’s go to the police. [But] she said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that … I just want to go home.”> I am filing this lawsuit for every woman who’s been pinched, prodded, cornered, felt-up …grabbed, groped, assaulted> > E Jean CarrollCarroll’s lawsuit says: “The rape of a woman is a violent crime; compounding that crime with acts of malicious libel is abhorrent. Yet that is what Defendant Donald J Trump did to Plaintiff E Jean Carroll.”The journalist, a longstanding advice columnist for Elle magazine, revealed her rape allegation in June in a memoir, What Do We Need Men For? In the book, she recounted how she stumbled across Trump in the Bergdorf store one evening in late 1995 or early 1996.They engaged in flirtatious banter, she wrote, after which the alleged attack happened in a small dressing room.After the claim was released Trump claimed he had never known Carroll, despite a photograph that emerged of the pair at a party with their then spouses in the 1980s. He also told the Hill newspaper he could not have raped Carroll because “she’s not my type”.Carroll’s lawsuit adds to the president’s legal entanglements. A former contestant on The Apprentice who was one of several women to accuse Trump before the 2016
election of sexual misconduct is also suing him for defamation after he denied her claims.Trump has failed to block the Summer Zervos case and it could go to trial next year.After describing her alleged rape, Carroll has had to deal with extreme public consequences. In an interview with the Guardian in July, she revealed she had received several death threats online and now slept with a loaded gun by her bed.In her defamation suit, Carroll accuses Trump of lashing out “with a series of false and defamatory statements. He denied the rape. But there was more: he also denied ever having met Carroll or even knowing who she was … he accused Carroll of lying about the rape in order to increase book sales and for good measure, insulted her physical appearance.”In a statement released to mark the launch of her suit, Carroll explained her decision to act in the language of the
MeToo movement.“I am filing this lawsuit for every woman who’s been pinched, prodded, cornered, felt-up, pushed against a wall, grabbed, groped, assaulted, and has spoken up only to be shamed, demeaned, disgraced, passed over for promotion, fired and forgotten.”She added: “No one, not even the president, is above the law.”Carroll’s lawyer in the case, Robbie Kaplan of the New York firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink, pointed out that in her Elle column, “Carroll encourages her readers to be brave, to think clearly and to seek justice. So Carroll has decided to follow her own advice.”