Politically speaking, Donald Trump was not hurt by the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.
Though many initially saw it as a harpoon shot through his presidential bid, he won the 2016 election anyway.
The former president may be getting his comeuppance this week.
Trump has been sued in federal court by the former Elle magazine advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll, who claims that Trump raped her in the mid-nineties and then defamed her after she wrote publicly about it in 2019 in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.”
The trial began its third week in Manhattan federal court on Monday with summations by opposing counsel.
Because it is a civil case, Trump cannot be found guilty of a crime.
At issue, instead, are civil claims — the New York state torts of battery and defamation.
Nevertheless, if the jury of six men and three women were to find Trump liable, it would be based on the conclusion that he did indeed sexually assault Carroll and then, decades later, falsely assert that she made the whole thing up.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that this case has flown under the radar, largely overlooked because of all the other investigations of Trump — the dubious indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and the more serious probes underway by, in particular, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, into Trump’s allegedly unlawful retention of classified intelligence at Mar-a-Lago, and his role in trying to prevent Congress from ratifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
If Trump is found liable for committing a sexual assault and assessed heavy damages, it will be a political earthquake.
Nothing like that has ever happened to a significant candidate for the presidency, let alone to a former president.
No, Trump wouldn’t face imprisonment or even prosecution — the criminal statute of limitations long ago lapsed.
But the damage a jury finding of liability could do to Trump’s candidacy could be devastating.
The Carroll team’s approach has been a clever one: make Trump the pivotal witness in the case.
Not on the witness stand — Trump has not even shown up for the trial, much less testified in front of the jury.
No, Carroll’s main witness is Trump as he appears in the “Access Hollywood” tape.
Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled prior to the trial that Carroll, in addition to testifying about her claim that Trump raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, would be permitted to play the tape for the jury.
Not just that. She was also permitted to call as witnesses two other women who claim to have been sexually assaulted by the former president.
Carroll’s lawyers did not play the recording in the abstract — the way the public has heard it, disconnected from any personal episode, with Trump dismissing it as “locker room talk.”
Instead, they played it during the testimony of Natasha Stoynoff, who wept as she described for the jury an incident in which, she claims, Trump steered her into an empty Mar-a-Lago room and forcibly kissed and pressed up against her until he was suddenly interrupted by a butler’s entry.
Thus, when the jury heard Trump bragging on the tape about being sexually aggressive with women, about kissing them and groping them without their consent, it was in the context of listening to a real person who said it happened to her.
And as they listened, still ringing in the jurors’ ears was not only Carroll’s sordid story but also the testimony of Jessica Leeds, who claims Trump assaulted her in the small first-class cabin of an airplane, groping her and reaching up her skirt.
These accounts match up with Trump’s own words describing what he bragged were his practices.
In summation on Monday morning, Carroll’s chief lawyer, Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) reminded the jury of Carroll’s description of the painfulness of the alleged rape — how Trump, she said, inserted his fingers into her private area before raping her.
“He grabbed her by the p***y,” Kaplan exclaimed.
Bracing language in a courtroom summation? Sure . . . but Kaplan was merely quoting Trump.
She was trying to convince the jury that Trump’s “Access Hollywood” words were not just banter; they were real life with real victims.
Will the strategy work? It might. There are significant questions about Carroll’s claims, not least that she can’t remember exactly when the rape happened, and that in the years afterwards she continued shopping at Bergdorf and watching Trump on “The Apprentice” — neither the scene nor the perp she described so traumatized her that she could no longer abide the sight of them.
Carroll waited decades to go public and, as Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina alleges, was trying to sell a book.
Moreover, Carroll and her witnesses – especially two friends to whom she made contemporaneous reports of the alleged rape — are strident opponents of Trump’s politics and have made themselves heroes on the Left for testifying against him.
Still, Carroll made Trump her most consequential witness, thanks to that infamous tape. So, the question is whether Trump will be hung by his own words.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
