Donald Trump’s inability to distinguish his ex-wife from his accuser could have been the former US president’s downfall in his civil court case.
Cringeworthy footage from Mr Trump’s deposition ahead of the two-week rape trial showed he incorrectly identified a picture of E Jean Carroll as his second wife Marla Maples. Four years earlier, when he was first accused of raping the magazine writer in a New York City department store during the mid-1990s, he emphatically denied the claim.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type,” he said. “Number two, it never happened.”
But when presented with a photograph of himself with his first wife, Ivana, and asked to identify the other woman in the picture with them he said: “That’s Marla. That’s my wife.”
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The other woman was, in fact, Ms Carroll. After it was brought to Mr Trump’s attention by his legal team that the person he was looking at was not his ex-wife, but his accuser, he simply replied: “Oh, I see.”
The blunder, Ms Carroll’s lawyers argued to jurors, demonstrated that Mr Trump was lying when he described the writer as not his “type”.
The jury in New York ordered Mr Trump to pay Ms Carroll 5 million dollars (£4 million) after finding him liable for sexual assault and defamation.
Jurors rejected Ms Carroll’s claims that she was raped, but found Mr Trump liable for sexual abuse and for defaming her after she made her allegations public.
Taking to his own social media platform after the verdict, Mr Trump wrote: “I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS.
“THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
Ms Carroll had brought a defamation case against the 76-year-old after he called her claims “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie” on his social media platform.
The frontrunner to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 US presidential election chose not to attend the civil trial and was absent when the verdict was read.
But his on-camera evidence was a focal point of his accuser’s case to the jury. At another point in Mr Trump’s 48 minutes of taped testimony, he suggested under oath that Ms Carroll “loved it” when asked about her claim she was raped.
“She loved it. She loved it. Until commercial break. It was sexy. It was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?,” Mr Trump said, referring to an interview Ms Carroll gave after going public with her claim.
The trial’s outcome was a validation for Ms Carroll, one of more than a dozen women who accused Mr Trump of sexual assault or harassment. She went public in 2019 with her allegation that the Republican raped her in the dressing room of an upmarket Manhattan department store.
Mr Trump, 76, denied it, saying he never encountered Ms Carroll at the store and did not know her. He has called her a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell a memoir.
Ms Carroll, 79, had sought unspecified damages and a retraction of what she said were Mr Trump’s defamatory denials of her claims.
She gave multiple days of frank, occasionally emotional evidence, buttressed by two friends who told jurors she reported the alleged attack to them in the moments and day afterwards.
Jurors also heard from Jessica Leeds, a former stockbroker who told the court that Mr Trump abruptly groped her against her will on a plane in the 1970s, and from Natasha Stoynoff, a writer who said he forcibly kissed her against her will while she was interviewing him for a 2005 article.
The jury of six men and three women also saw the well-known 2005 recording of Mr Trump talking about kissing and grabbing women without asking.
