In Rape Trial, Jury Must Now Decide if It Believes Carroll or Trump

As the civil trial over the writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that former President Donald J. Trump raped her neared its end, one of her lawyers focused on the man who was missing from the courtroom.

Mr. Trump did not testify on his own behalf or even show up.

“He just decided not to be here,” the lawyer, Michael J. Ferrara, told the jury on Monday. “He never looked you in the eye and denied raping Ms. Carroll.”

He added, “You should draw the conclusion that that’s because he did it.”

But Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said that there was no reason for his client to appear in court. The rape allegation, he said, was a complete invention.

Mr. Tacopina took an uncompromising line during the two-week civil trial in Manhattan federal court, the first time that Mr. Trump, 76, who has faced years of allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with women, has had to answer such a claim at trial.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer argued that his client was never even in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room where Ms. Carroll said he attacked her one evening in 1996. Ms. Carroll, 79, and the witnesses she called to corroborate her account had simply made up the story, Mr. Tacopina argued, and so had other witnesses at the trial who said under oath that they, too, had been sexually attacked by Mr. Trump.

“Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable,” Mr. Tacopina said. “Everything in this case is one of those things.”

On Tuesday, the jurors are to begin deliberations after the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, instructs them on the law. Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit, brought under a New York law that provides a one-year window for sexual abuse victims to sue, seeks damages for battery and defamation: Mr. Trump on his Truth Social website had called Ms. Carroll’s case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”

The trial comes as Mr. Trump faces a barrage of legal actions related to his political and business activities, including federal and state investigations, criminal charges filed by the Manhattan district attorney and a lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general.

In Ms. Carroll’s civil suit, the standard of proof is different from that of a criminal case: The jury must decide whether her lawyers have proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump committed battery.

As closing arguments began Monday morning, Roberta A. Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lead lawyer, took the jury through the evidence, Ms. Carroll’s testimony and witnesses’ statements that she said supported it.

Two of Ms. Carroll’s friends — Lisa Birnbach, an author and journalist, and Carol Martin, a former TV anchor — each had testified that almost immediately after the encounter at Bergdorf Goodman, she had told them Mr. Trump had attacked her.

Two other women testified that they were assaulted by Mr. Trump in much the same way. Jessica Leeds, a former stockbroker, testified that Mr. Trump had groped her and kissed her without her consent in the 1970s. Natasha Stoynoff, a former writer for People magazine, said that during an interview, Mr. Trump lured her into a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate, pushed her against a wall and kissed her without her consent.

Ms. Kaplan said the defense’s position that Ms. Carroll and her witnesses were all lying was preposterous. “Donald Trump’s defense here is essentially that there is a vast conspiracy against him,” she said.

Ms. Kaplan compared the way her client had appeared during the trial — a “courageous” woman who answered questions “calmly and patiently” — to Mr. Trump’s behavior in a videotaped deposition shown to the jury.

In it, Mr. Trump had said he could not have raped Ms. Carroll because she was not his “type.” But Ms. Kaplan noted in court that when she showed him a photograph of Ms. Carroll greeting him at a function in the 1980s, he misidentified her as Marla Maples, his second wife.

“The truth is that E. Jean Carroll, a former cheerleader and Miss Indiana, was exactly Donald Trump’s type,” she said.

Ms. Kaplan said the experience of Ms. Leeds and Ms. Stoynoff showed a pattern: “Trump followed this same playbook when he attacked Ms. Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman.”

She also noted Mr. Trump’s response when she asked him at his deposition about the “Access Hollywood” recording, which became public in 2016. In it, he bragged about grabbing women by their genitals and said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

In the deposition, Mr. Trump did not repudiate his comment. “Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he said, adding that he considered himself one.

Ms. Kaplan told the jury: “He thinks stars like him can get away with it. He thinks he can get away with it here.”

She added: “Much of what Donald Trump says actually supports our side of the case. In a very real sense, Donald Trump here is a witness against himself.”

For his part, Mr. Tacopina said Mr. Trump was not a man in need of witnesses.

“Donald Trump doesn’t have a story to tell here, other than to say it’s a lie,” Mr. Tacopina said in his summation. He questioned who might even be appropriate to call to the witness stand, asking, “How do you prove a negative?”

He called Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit a “scam” and said that she had brought her false claim “for, amongst other things, money, status, political reasons.”

Mr. Tacopina then proceeded, over more than two hours, to challenge not only Ms. Carroll’s testimony but also that of nearly every other witness who took the stand in her case.

He pointed out how Ms. Carroll could not recall a date for the supposed assault and how she had come up with a new detail — testifying that the attack must have occurred on a Thursday because Bergdorf’s was open late on that day.

“She tailored her testimony right in front of you,” Mr. Tacopina said.

He rejected Ms. Kaplan’s argument that Mr. Trump’s comments in the “Access Hollywood” tape showed he was a predator.

“He talked that way, he said that, but that doesn’t make Ms. Carroll’s unbelievable story believable,” Mr. Tacopina said.

During the course of the trial, Mr. Tacopina, in his cross-examination of Ms. Carroll, probed for inconsistencies in her story and gaps in her memory and noted that in her testimony, she said that she did not scream during the attack.

In rebuttal, Mr. Ferrara told the jurors Monday that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had an idea of the “perfect rape victim” — one who never laughs again, never tries to hold their rapist accountable, never gets their day in court. “The perfect rape victim screams,” he said.

“That’s the defense’s out-of-date, out-of-touch view,” Mr. Ferrara said. “It is as wrong as it is offensive.”