Former President Donald Trump and protection lawyer Joe Tacopina at Trump’s Manhattan arraignment on April 4, 2023.Andrew Kelly/AP
Joe Tacopina is defending Donald Trump at trial in opposition to E. Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation claims.
Tacopina received his final huge rape case by telling jurors the accuser was mentally troubled and out for cash.
Twelve years later, he’s utilizing an analogous attack-dog technique in opposition to Carroll in an ongoing Manhattan civil trial.
When confronting rape accusers in courtroom, Joe Tacopina — Donald Trump’s pugilist lawyer within the ongoing E. Jean Carroll trial — doesn’t put on child gloves.
Boxing gloves are extra prefer it.
Twelve years in the past, Tacopina defended an NYPD cop accused of the on-duty rape of a girl so intoxicated, her taxi driver known as 911 as a result of she could not get out of the cab.
Tacopina’s offensive in opposition to this 28-year-old girl was brutal, relentless, and profitable.
By the point he received an acquittal in a high-profile, 2011 Manhattan prison trial, Tacopina had attacked what he known as her “purposeful tolerance” for alcohol.
“She walked up 5 flights of stairs in excessive heels,” from the cab to her East Village, Manhattan house, because the officers escorted her dwelling, Tacopina mentioned in closing arguments. “Do not attempt that experiment at dwelling,” he added, to juror laughter.
Additionally famous by the protection had been the unidentified semen stains discovered on the girl’s mattress and pillow sham, proof used to recommend she slept round and to bolster the cop’s insistence that between her bouts of vomiting and unconsciousness, she had stripped all the way down to solely her bra and tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce him.
“We’re not doing this,” the cop testified he’d advised the girl, rebuffing her advances.
I coated the case for the New York Publish, and I recall these notably ugly assaults — she’s sexually lively, she’s a purposeful drunk, the type of accusations which might be juror kryptonite right this moment, in a post-#MeToo world — to indicate how Tacopina performs tough to win.
Former recommendation columnist E. Jean Carroll, proper, leaves federal courtroom together with her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, after her second day on the witness stand in federal courtroom in Manhattan.Bebeto Matthews/AP
Quick ahead a dozen years and Tacopina is below a brighter highlight as he labors to guard Trump — a former and would-be United States president — from a 79-year-old recommendation columnist.
Story continues
Carroll alleges that Trump raped her within the dressing room of a luxurious Manhattan division retailer, Bergdorf Goodman, again within the mid-90s, then known as her a liar after she made that accusation in 2019, in New York journal and a memoir, “What Do We Want Males For?”
In combating Carroll’s civil claims of battery and defamation, Tacopina is once more enjoying tough, saying that in 2019 that, out of greed and political bias, Carroll and her buddies concocted a “story” about her being “supposedly” raped.
“She wished to develop into a celeb, which she has, by the way in which,” Tacopina advised jurors, all 9 of whom certainly stroll previous a fleet of TV vehicles and information cameras on getting into the federal courthouse every day.
However will one other all-out, guns-blazing assault on the motives and psychological well being of a sympathetic, tearful rape accuser work in 2023 Manhattan?
Calling his consumer’s accuser grasping — and a little bit loopy — might have raised affordable doubt 12 years in the past. However this can be a civil case, the place the extent of proof is decrease: a mere preponderance of the proof.
And this time round, the defendant is Trump, a person already unpopular in Manhattan, the place simply 12% of the voters voted for him, and whose historical past of conduct with different ladies may also be weighed by jurors.
There’s additionally this distinction: Carroll is, fairly arguably, killing it to this point in two days on the witness stand, deftly confronting and defusing the extra perplexing parts of her account.
Why did you wait so lengthy — greater than 20 years — to return ahead, Tacopina requested her on Thursday.
“I noticed different ladies coming ahead after Harvey Weinstein and I assumed, who am I? Who am I to remain silent?” she answered.
Why did not you scream within the dressing room, Tacopina requested.
“This is the factor,” she advised him. “I used to be an excessive amount of in a panic to screech. I used to be combating,” she mentioned of what she described as three minutes of mute hell.
“You possibly can’t beat up on me for not screaming,” she warned Tacopina, assembly his look as they confronted one another throughout the courtroom.
“I am not beating up on you,” Tacopina protested. “I am asking you questions, Ms. Carroll.”
“No,” she shot again.
“Ladies who come ahead, one of many causes they do not come ahead is as a result of they’re at all times requested why did not you scream. Some ladies scream. Some ladies do not. It retains ladies silent,” she advised him.
“I am telling you,” she added at one other level, her voice agency. “He raped me, whether or not I screamed or not.”
E. Jean Carroll arrives at federal courtroom in Manhattan for the primary day of her rape-deposition civil trial in opposition to Donald Trump.Seth Wenig/AP
Then there’s #MeToo itself.
“It has been dangerous for a while to assault victims of sexual assault,” a former Manhattan intercourse crimes prosecutor advised me not too long ago, asking to not be quoted by title.
“Jurors hate it,” the ex-prosecutor added. “However it could be malpractice to not assault a ridiculous narrative.”
Carroll advised jurors that after operating into Trump by likelihood, she agreed, as a part of what began as a playful back-and-forth, to assist him select lingerie for a “pal.”
A second former Manhattan intercourse crimes prosecutor, who additionally requested to not be named, agreed the story is problematic.
“I believe it is harmful to make the assault — that she’s loopy — too emphatically,” this second prosecutor mentioned. “However I imply, the story is odd,” they mentioned of Carroll’s account.
“Taking part in with a man verbally, to the purpose the place you go into the dressing room, after which make no outcry. There’s room to make her look dangerous, in case you do it gently,” they mentioned.
“However in these #MeToo occasions, it is simply actually as possible that won’t play,” they added. Particularly in a he-said, she-said intercourse case, vilifying a rape accuser “continues to be a crap shoot” with juries, they mentioned.
This courtroom sketch exhibits E. Jean Carroll testifying for a second day in her rape-defamation trial in opposition to Donald Trump in federal courtroom in Manhattan.Elizabeth Williams/AP
Which ends up in essentially the most attention-grabbing parallel between Tacopina’s two rape-case protection methods. Each instances boil all the way down to the accused’s phrase (it did not occur) in opposition to the accuser’s (it most definitely did occur), with no forensics or eye-witness to interrupt the he-she deadlock.
This has allowed Tacopina, then and now, to supply his personal spin on the girl’s story after which assault that model as past perception.
Twelve years in the past, jurors heard a prosecution case a couple of younger girl who awoke from an nearly completely blacked-out night, with only some distinct moments surviving, like strobe-light flashes seared into her thoughts’s eye.
She remembered the sound, inexplicable to her, of Velcro ripping, she advised jurors. In first describing that particular sound to investigators, she had had no means, as a civilian, of realizing that an NYPD bullet-proof vest is secured by Velcro, prosecutors mentioned.
She remembered in graphic element being immobilized in her mattress — too drunk to withstand — as she was allegedly raped, she advised jurors.
And she or he described flashlight beams and a number of arms looking out the bedding round her physique earlier than the 2 officers’ frantic departure — “frisking the mattress” for incriminating proof, the prosecution known as it.
However that 2011 jury additionally heard, from Tacopina, a couple of heroic, compassionate, police officer — a 17-year NYPD veteran, a self-sacrificing 9/11 first responder, and a literal childhood altar boy — who was simply attempting to assist a troubled girl on that December 2008 evening when he and his accomplice made three return journeys, forwards and backwards, to her vomit-spattered house.
Carroll, proper, is depicted testifying in the course of the trial on Thursday, whereas below questioning from Tacopina, left.Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
In Carroll v. Trump, Tacopina once more casts his consumer because the hero of the protection story, in his case as a righteously offended man lashing out within the title of fact in opposition to a girl obsessive about cash, with fame, and with taking him down.
“She known as him a rapist,” Tacopina advised the jury in openings Monday.
“After all, he exploded. After all, he attacked her,” he mentioned of Trump, who has continued to name Carroll “sick” and “a whack job,” even in his videotaped trial deposition.
“It is a huge fats hoax,” Trump, who is just not attending the trial, mentioned in his deposition, which, when it is performed at trial, would be the solely time jurors hear his voice, assuming he continues to keep away from the courtroom.
“She’s a liar,” Trump mentioned in his deposition. “And she or he’s a sick individual, for my part. Actually sick — one thing mistaken together with her.”
Jurors are additionally listening to, after all, from Carroll herself. She readily admits she will’t keep in mind the day, month, and even time of 12 months she says she was attacked.
She wore a wool costume, however no coat, she advised jurors. So it might have been the winter of 1995. Or it might have been the spring of 1996. Perhaps, she testified, it was a Thursday, the one evening the shop stayed open previous 6 p.m., although she will’t be certain.
Nonetheless, she advised jurors, she vividly remembers the ache of Trump’s fingers violating her.
“As I am sitting right here right this moment, I can nonetheless really feel it,” Carroll advised jurors, her voice breaking as she described, out of an in any other case time-darkened previous, one mind-searing, strobe-lit second of readability.
Carroll is again on the stand on Monday, nonetheless below cross-examination by Tacopina, who will possible proceed to poke holes in her account, which she described in her memoir as “odd.”
Why did not she use the phrase “rape” when she known as a girlfriend, minutes after the incident? Why did not she search medical consideration, even to examine for sexually-transmitted ailments?
How did she push a a lot bigger Trump away from her within the dressing room — managing, as she described it, to lift her proper leg excessive sufficient to knee him within the hip whereas balancing on her left leg, and all of the whereas sporting four-inch heels?
Might she have managed this balancing act, as she described it to jurors, together with her pulled-down tights round her thighs, and with out dropping maintain, in her proper hand, of a black leather-based Coach purse with “arise handles?”
It is going to be as much as Carroll’s personal authorized crew, led by lawyer Roberta Kaplan, to persuade jurors within the coming days that it is the very imperfections in Carroll’s story that finest show the reality of it.
E. Jean Carroll solutions questions from her lawyer, Michael Ferrara, throughout a civil trial, in federal courtroom in Manhattan, to determine whether or not former US President Donald Trump raped Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman division retailer dressing room within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, and defamed her by denying it occurred.Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
To date, Carroll’s explanations are touchdown properly.
“I can dance backwards and forwards in four-inch heels,” she advised Tacopina when he questioned her dressing-room balancing act. “I can elevate one leg in heels.”
As for her story’s many different oddities, Carroll is convincingly chalking these as much as her personal dangerous selections, to adrenaline and denial, and to a lifetime’s cussed, ingrained inclination to sally forth, at all times cheerfully, till, she says, her silence was swept away in that wave of girls’s voices.
“It brought on me to understand that staying silent doesn’t work,” she advised Tacopina of the braveness she noticed in that #MeToo wave.
“It does not work,” she advised him. “If ladies converse up, now we have an opportunity of limiting the hurt to others.”
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