The two women whom E. Jean Carroll confided in about her alleged sexual assault by President Trump at the time it happened came forward to tell their side of the story.
Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach both went public in an interview with the New York Times that included Carroll, describing Carroll telling them about the assault.
Carroll, 75, accused Trump in an early release of an excerpt of her book of sexually assaulting her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in 1995 or 1996.
“‘He pulled down my tights. He pulled down my tights,’” Birnbach recalled Carroll saying in the interview, which was released Thursday. Birnbach said initially both the women were laughing until she realized that what Carroll was describing was rape.
“Honestly, you did say, ‘He put his penis in me,’” Birnbach said. “And I said, ‘What, he raped you?'”
Birnbach said she told Carroll to go to the police but she refused. Carroll described how she viewed the incident in the interview at the time: “It was a fight. It was not a crime,” saying she does not choose to remember it as a rape.
Martin said her response to the incident was different from Birnbach. She told Carroll not to tell anyone because Trump was a powerful man.
The women said that after these two separate conversations, the two of them never talked about the incident again.
