Writer E. Jean Caroll was all over the media on Monday following her big victory last week in her defamation trail against Donald Trump. Including MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night, where she told Maddow that during the trial, Trump ceased to intimidate her.
“This team of brilliant young people have, as you said, stood up to the man,” Carroll, who appeared on the show with her attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, told Maddow.
“Who, by the way, Rachel is not even there. He’s nothing,” Carroll continued. “He is without. He is like a walrus snorting, and like a rhino flopping his head. It was… he is not there. That was a surprising thing to me.”
Maddow replied with a question, saying, “being face to face with him, being in the same physical space with him for the first time since when you say he assaulted you in 1996. What you’re describing there in terms of him being nothing, him feeling like an animal, him feeling not intimidating. Was that a shock to you? Because I mean, your guts here your bravery here includes the physical bravery about being around him again. It sounds like it didn’t go the way you expected it to once you were in the same room.”
“No, Rachel, I was terrified. I was I was just a bag of sweating corpuscles as we prepared for trial. And three days, four days before trial, I had an actual breakdown. I lost my ability to speak. I lost my words. I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t go on it. It was that’s how frightened I was,” Carroll explained.
“But oddly, we went into court, Robbie [Kaplan]took the lectern. I sat in the witness chair like this, and she said, Ms. Carroll, good morning, would you please spell your name for the court? And amazingly, I looked down, and he was nothing. He was nothing. He was a phantom,” Carroll continued.
“It was the people around him who were giving him power. He himself was nothing. It was an astonishing discovery for me, he’s nothing. We don’t need to be afraid of him. He can be knocked down twice by this woman right here.”
Watch the clip below: