Donald Trump should be convicted of sexually assaulting an advice columnist in 1996 because even former presidents are not above the law, a lawyer for the columnist declared Monday, in the presentation of closing arguments in the lawsuit against him. to Trump of rape.
A Trump attorney responded by saying the accuser’s account is not credible and that no one is below the law either.
Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer for columnist E. Jean Carroll, showed the jury videos of Trump’s October deposition and played the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump, unaware that the microphone it was on, admits that celebrities can touch women’s genitals without answering for it.
Kaplan recalled that Trump admitted there that “stars like him can sexually assault women with impunity.”
“This is Donald Trump. That’s how he thinks. And that’s how he acts,” Kaplan said. “He believes that he can go unpunished.”
Kaplan used Trump’s own words to support Carroll’s claim that Trump raped her in a fitting room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996.
Joe Tacopina, Trump’s lawyer, attacked the allegations as absurd, saying they are “an affront to justice” and minimize “the real victims of rape.”
He agreed with Kaplan that no one is above the law, but warned that “no one is below it either.”
Tacopina told jurors that they will not have to “let her win millions of dollars” because “they will have no doubt about how this story, this fraudulent lawsuit, was concocted.”
Tacopina repeatedly called Carroll’s allegations “impossible to believe,” saying she made them just for status and political reasons.
She added that Carroll herself had testified that it had been “an astonishing coincidence” that an episode of a “Law and Order” spinoff, broadcast in 2012, dealt with the rape of a woman in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room.
