E. Jean Carroll has sued the former president, saying he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. He has said she fabricated the encounter, which she described in her 2019 memoir.
A chance encounter decades ago set off the trial that began Tuesday.
Follow our live coverage of E. Jean Carroll’s testimony in Trump rape case.
A lawyer for the writer E. Jean Carroll told a Manhattan jury on Tuesday that former President Donald J. Trump viciously raped her client one evening nearly 30 years ago in a department store dressing room, an assault that she said Ms. Carroll, filled with fear and shame, long had kept secret.
“The whole attack lasted just a few minutes, but it would stay with her forever,” the lawyer, Shawn G. Crowley, said in an opening statement in a trial in Federal District Court. She told the jury that the case is Ms. Carroll’s chance “to clear her name, to pursue justice and to get her life back.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, followed with an aggressive attack on Ms. Carroll, contending that her account was untrue and accusing her of exploiting her story for personal gain.
“She became a celebrity and loved every minute of it,” Mr. Tacopina said.
The lawyers’ unreconcilable characterizations came on the first day of the trial in the lawsuit by Ms. Carroll against Mr. Trump, brought under a new law in New York that allows sexual assault victims to sue the people they say abused them, even if the statute of limitations has long expired.
The trial, expected to last one to two weeks, seeks to apply the accountability of the #MeToo era to a dominating political figure. It takes place amid a barrage of legal action aimed at Mr. Trump, who is running to regain the presidency and arguing that lawsuits and investigations that he faces are meant to drag him down.
Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to New York fraud charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star, and faces a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the state’s attorney general. He is the target of a criminal investigation in Georgia over attempted interference in the 2020 election. In addition, a federal special counsel is examining the discovery of sensitive documents at his residence, as well as his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. He has denied wrongdoing in all the cases.
In Ms. Carroll’s case, her lawyers will ask the jury to find Mr. Trump liable for battery and defamation, and if he is found responsible, to award monetary damages.
