What are the allegations at the center of the E Jean Carroll rape trial against Trump?

The meeting, as E Jean Carroll recalls, was friendly at first.

Ms. Carroll, then a magazine writer and television presenter, bumped into Donald Trump at New York’s luxurious Bergdorf Goodman department store.

As Carroll wrote in his 2019 memoir What do we need men for?, He recognized her as “that lady from the advice.” She knew him as “that real estate mogul.”

Trump allegedly told her that he was there to buy a gift for “a girl” and asked for her help in choosing an appropriate item.

She placed the incident in late 1995 or early 1996, when the future president was married to Marla Maples.

The couple headed to the lingerie section, where Trump suggested she try on a lace bodysuit.

She jokingly says that he should try it on.

When they reached the locker room, Carroll alleges that Trump pushed her against a wall, put his hands under her dress and pulled down her stockings.

He then unbuttons his pants and “forcing his fingers around my private area, he pushes his penis halfway, or completely, I’m not sure, into me,” she wrote.

A “colossal struggle” ensued, he said, and Ms Carroll finally pushed him and ran out of the dressing room. The episode was over in less than three minutes, she wrote.

After the allegations were first made in an excerpt from a book in NY magazine in June 2019, Trump angrily denied it.

“I have never met this person in my life. He’s trying to sell a new book, that should indicate his motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section,” he said in an official White House statement that month.

Then, days later, in an Oval Office interview with The hillTrump went even further.

“I’ll say it with a lot of respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay?

Ms. Carroll then filed a defamation suit against Mr. Trump alleging that he had damaged her reputation, substantially harmed her professionally, and caused her emotional pain.

after writing Ask E Jean column for elle magazine for nearly 30 years, the magazine abruptly terminated her contract in December of that year. The magazine denied that it was connected to Carroll’s allegations.

In 2022, New York passed the Adult Survivors Act allowing adult survivors of sexual assault one year to sue their alleged abusers.

Ms. Carroll filed a second lawsuit against Mr. Trump for rape and additional alleged defamatory statements made by him in October 2022, calling it a “complete scam.”

In a court filing earlier this year, Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the central issue in both cases is the same: whether Trump raped Carroll.

“If he didn’t, then Ms. Carroll’s sexual assault claim … and her defamation claims in both cases would likely fail.

“If it did, there would be little left in any case, except perhaps some minor issues related to Mr. Trump’s statements and the determination of damages.”

In addition to Carroll herself, her lawyers plan to call several friends she spoke with about the allegations at the time, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Ashlee Humphreys, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said they tried for three years to get Trump’s DNA sample to compare it to stains found on the dress she was wearing that day.

After refusing to provide a sample, Trump’s lawyers made a last-minute offer to do so earlier this year. Judge Kaplan rejected the offer.

For the defense, Trump’s lawyers included him, CNN host Anderson Cooper and several others on their list of potential witnesses.

Trump has not confirmed whether he will attend the trial, which begins at the US District Court in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, April 25.

Since the case is being tried in civil court, the jury will likely be asked to determine whether there is “a preponderance of the evidence” to prove Ms. Carroll’s assertions, rather than the criminal standard of “beyond all reasonable doubt.”

More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault.