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- In an October 2022 deposition, Trump was asked about a post he wrote about E. Jean Carroll.
- In the post, Trump denied that he had ever “swooned” Carroll, who accuses him of raping her.
- Trump said he used the term because “it’s a nicer word than the word that starts with an F.”
When former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social in October 2022 to deny that he sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, he wrote that his accuser was “not my type” and that he had never “swooned” her. A week later, a lawyer for Carroll got the chance to ask him what exactly he meant by that.
In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump denied the accusation and called her a liar out to sell books. She then sued him for defamation.
As part of that lawsuit, Trump was forced to sit for a deposition with Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, on October 19, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago seven days after his post on social media. Portions of that deposition were released Friday and show a hostile former president threatening retaliatory lawsuits, not just against Carroll but Kaplan herself.
“What does ‘swooned her’ mean?” Kaplan asked the former president in one exchange.
Trump responded: “That would be a word, maybe accurate or not, having to do with talking to her and talking her — to do an act that she said happened, which didn’t happen. And it’s a nicer word than the word that starts with an F, and this would be word that I used because I thought it would be inappropriate to use the other word. And it didn’t happen.”
Merriam-Webster defines the verb “swoon” as to “faint” or “to become enraptured.” In the deposition, Kaplan noted a similar definition, asking: “That’s not what you meant here?”
“Well,” Trump said, “sort of that’s what she said I did to her. She fainted with great emotion. She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break. In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
In fact, Carroll did not say she enjoyed the former president’s alleged assault or that she herself viewed rape as “sexy.”
Rather, in a 2019 appearance on CNN, she said the alleged attack “was not sexual. It just — it hurt,” which she contrasted with “fantasies” of sexual assault “being sexy.”
Trump’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request from an Insider reporter for comment.
