World News | Trump lawyers say they won’t call witnesses in rape trial

NEW YORK, May 3 (AP) – Donald Trump’s lawyers said Wednesday they will not call any witnesses in the New York civil trial of author E. Jean Carroll who claims the former president raped her in the mid-1990s.

Trump’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, said they decided not to enter the defense after learning that health issues prevented their expert witness, a psychiatrist, from testifying. Tacopina previously revealed that Trump will not testify at the trial in Manhattan federal court.

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Carroll’s attorneys said they could complete their submissions on Thursday.

They named five remaining witnesses, including a former People magazine writer who said Trump pinned her to a wall and forcibly kissed her in 2005 at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida. She, but he denies the allegation.

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They also plan to play excerpts of Trump’s sworn testimony on the Carroll lawsuit, as well as the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

Trump has denied ever approaching women against their will and said Carroll’s claims were politically motivated in an attempt to discredit him and disenfranchise him in the White House.

His lawyers attacked Carroll’s credibility through exhaustive cross-examination, questioning why she did not call for help during the alleged attack and why she never called the police.

A psychologist who testified on Carroll’s behalf testified Wednesday that rape victims often remain silent and blame themselves.

The case will not go to trial on Friday, meaning jurors can hear closing arguments and begin deliberations next week.

“I think you can reasonably expect to hear this case early next week,” Judge Lewis Kaplan told jurors.

Earlier Wednesday, a clinical psychologist hired by Carroll’s attorneys testified that Carroll showed common signs of trauma and was able to move on with her life in part by blaming herself and relying on her exuberant public persona .

Psychologist Leslie Leibovitz said Carroll avoided intimacy, sometimes shut down during dates, and often found herself resisting what she said was Trump’s sympathy in a dressing room at a luxury Manhattan department store. “Intrusive memories” of things she’s done.

Testifying the next day, Leibovitz conveyed decades of clinical expertise and her observations of Carroll in interviews prepared for the trial. Carroll testified last week that Leibovitz was the only mental health professional she had spoken to since the alleged sexual assault.

“For years, she simply blamed herself for the attack, thinking she just did something stupid and that’s why it happened,” Leibovitz said.

For 17 years, Carroll didn’t speak publicly about it. But in her 2019 memoir, she described a chance encounter with Trump in a store in the spring of 1996, which she sometimes flirted with, when he cornered her in a dressing room after they challenged each other to try on a piece of underwear , which ends violently.

Carol is a “very resilient person,” Leibovitz said, explaining that the combination of her role as an advice columnist for the popular Elle magazine and her Midwestern upbringing led her to try to Her experience with Trump is kept under wraps.

“It made her feel worthless. She felt demeaned, degraded,” Leibovitz said. “MS. In many ways, Carol, like most of us, doesn’t want to be a victim, doesn’t want to be pitied. But she’s seen more strongly than most as someone who… can move on …and leave it behind.”

Still, the psychologist said there were times when she was almost overwhelmed by her own memories, like when she first saw a trailer for Trump’s TV show “The Apprentice.”

“Her memories and feelings and feelings of panic flooded her to such an extent that she literally lost the ability to speak,” Lebowitz said.

Leibovitz said Carroll sometimes “experienced intrusive body memories” in which the memory of the attack “hovered in front of her like a video.”

At one point, Leibovitz said, she was talking to Carroll and noticed “she started squirming in the seat because she was experiencing Mr. Trump’s finger inside her, or what she claimed was Mr. Trump’s fingers inside her.” (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)