E. Jean Carroll testifies she lives in fear of threats from Trump supporters

Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll testified on Wednesday that, every day, she is afraid of former President Donald Trump's supporters who have aimed threats and insults at her in texts, emails and on social media over her accusation that the former president sexually assaulted her.

Carroll was the only witness to take the stand for the ongoing defamation trial against Trump that will determine how much money, if any, he will have to pay for denying the sexual attack.

He was found liable for defamation in a previous jury trial last year. She's seeking $10 million in damages.

The writer’s testimony was punctuated by Judge Lewis Kaplan’s increasing annoyance with the former commander in chief and his lawyer, who seemed to test his patience at every turn.

The bickering began when the judge refused to adjourn the case for a day on Thursday so that Trump could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in Florida without missing any testimony, according to The Associated Press.

After his lawyer, Alina Habba, called the judge’s ruling “insanely prejudicial,” Kaplan cut her off, telling her that he would “hear no further argument on it,” the wire service reported.

“I will not be spoken to that way, your honor,” Habba responded and brought up the funeral again.

“It’s denied. Sit down,” he told her, according to the AP.

Carroll testified that on June 21, 2019, the day New York magazine published her book excerpt on her account of a sexual assault by Trump in a department store changing room, she started to receive death threats and hate mail that made her fear for her life.

She told the jury that she was staying in a small hotel on Fifth Avenue when she got an email with the image of a severed head.

“The image of the person’s head led me to believe that I was going to get shot,” she said. Carroll told the jury that she couldn’t close the blinds in the hotel room and was convinced that she would be targeted through the window.

“When I see messages like that, my brain reels, my body reacts, my pulse races. I become on high alert. I just delete, delete, delete. It helps me get control of the situation.”

Other emails displayed to the jury showed emails with more explicit threats.

Carroll became emotional on the witness stand, her voice cracking.

“I’m sorry to the audience. When a woman reads these words, she can’t help but see the image,” she said.

She said that she’s now constantly vigilant of potential threats, even in the small mountain town where she lives in upstate New York.

Carroll said that she left a shopping cart full of groceries she had paid for and fled a supermarket after she became suspicious of a man who appeared to be waiting by her car.

She acknowledged that it was not until Republican lawyer George Conway, an outspoken critic of the former president, suggested that she sue and recommended her current lawyer Roberta Kaplan, that she decided to bring the lawsuit.

Midway through the morning testimony, Roberta Kaplan’s co-counsel Shawn Crowley alerted the judge that Trump had been making comments that undermined Carroll’s testimony.

“Mr. Trump has been loudly saying things, including that the witness is lying and noting that she has suddenly gotten her memory back,” Crowley said.

Lewis Kaplan admonished the former president’s team to “take special care to keep his voice down when conferring to the client.”

Just before the lunch break, Crowley spoke up again, pointing out that Trump continued to make comments.

“The defendant has been making comments that we can hear at the plaintiff’s table like this is a witch hunt and a con job,” she said.

The judge threatened to bar him from the courtroom, at which point Trump held out his arms and shrugged.

“Mr. Trump, I hope I don’t have to insist that you be excluded, but I think you want that. You just can’t control yourself,” the judge said.

During the cross-examination, Habba sought to show that Carroll was using her allegations against Trump to rekindle her flagging writing career.

Though the president’s name was only mentioned once in the book she was promoting in June 2019, she went on TV talk shows and spoke about him exclusively.

“I didn’t like mentioning his name,” she said. “Usually it was the interviewer who asked about him.”

Again, during the cross-examination, the judge excoriated Trump’s lawyers over errors he said she made in entering evidence.

“We’re going to do it my way and that’s all there is to it,” Lewis Kaplan said.

At one point, after Carroll again admitted that she deleted some threatening emails, Trump’s lawyer moved for a mistrial.

“Denied,” the judge responded. “The jury will disregard everything that Ms. Habba just said.”

The cross-examination will continue on Thursday.