A longtime friend of E. Jean Carroll‘s testified in federal court Tuesday that the writer called her “minutes” after Donald Trump allegedly raped her in a Manhattan department store.
“You’re not going to believe what just happened to me,” Lisa Birnbach recalled Carroll saying to her in the 1996 phone conversation.
Birnbach, a fellow writer who had recently interviewed Trump, described Carroll as sounding “breathless, hyperventilating” and “emotional” during the phone call.
“Her voice was doing all sorts of things,” Birnbach told jurors in the Manhattan court, where Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation.
Birnbach said Carroll told her she’d been shopping with Trump in Bergdorf Goodman before he accosted her in a dressing room and “penetrated” her.
“I said, ‘Jean, he raped you. You should go to the police,'” Birnbach testified. “She said, ‘No, no. I don’t want to go to the police.'”
Birnbach said she offered to escort Carroll to the police station but she refused to go before making Birnbach vow not to tell anyone else what she’d just told her.
“She said, ‘Promise me you will never speak of this again and you will tell no one’ and I promised her both those things,” Birnbach said, adding that she kept her word.
“It was her life, her story, not my story, and she clearly didn’t want to tell anyone else what happened and I honored that,” Birnbach said. Over time, she said she “buried” the information in her mind and “as life went on it was easier not to think about it.”
She said they didn’t speak about the incident again until 2019, when Carroll was writing a book where she went public with her account.
“After I read the excerpts I called her and told her how brave she was,” Birnbach said.
She said she was testifying voluntarily, even though she’d been subjected to online hate when she first corroborated Carroll’s account publicly in 2019.
“I am here because my good friend, who is a good person” had “told me something terrible that happened to her,” Birnbach said, and “I want the world to know that she was telling the truth.”
Trump, who was president at the time the book came out, has denied Carroll’s claims, calling them a “hoax” and a “con job.”
Birnbach, one of the authors of the best-selling “The Official Preppy Handbook,” acknowledged she’s a longtime Democrat who’s been critical of Trump in the past. Asked by Carroll’s attorney if she’d ever referred to Trump as a “narcissistic sociopath,” Birnbach said, “That sounds right.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
