Donald Trump’s defense team will opt not to put on a defense in writer E. Jean Carroll’s battery and defamation lawsuit, a sign they believe Carroll did not provide enough evidence to support her claim that Trump assaulted her, Politico reports. Carroll claimed Trump raped her in a New York City department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Joe Tacopina, the latest in a long line of questionable counsel hired by the former president, said Wednesday he had planned to call a psychiatrist to the stand as the defense’s only witness, but due to a medical issue, the witness was not available. During Wednesday’s session, Carroll’s attorneys questioned a number of witnesses to whom Carroll gave contemporaneous accounts of the Trump assault before her claim became public in a 2019 New York Magazine.