“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type,” Trump told The Hill. “Number two, it never happened.”
While being deposed by Carroll’s attorneys last October, he confirmed that he stood by the statement. He also confirmed that he stood by a similar remark — “this woman is not my type” — offered on social media shortly before the day of the deposition itself. In fact, Trump called that latter post a “great statement,” with relish.
By that point in the deposition, though, he’d already messed up.
Carroll’s attorneys had handed Trump a black-and-white photograph showing Trump at a social event at some point generally contemporaneous to the time of the alleged rape. Trump considered it for a moment, identifying one man as former television anchor John Johnson. Then he pointed at a woman on the left side of the photo.
“It’s Marla,” he said, referring to his former wife Marla Maples.
There was a pause. Then the attorneys for Carroll prompted him: “You’re saying Marla is in this photo?”
“That’s Marla, yeah,” Trump replied. “That’s my wife.”
Carroll’s attorneys, hoping to clarify, asked him which woman he was pointing to. There was one of Trump’s wives in the photo: his first wife, Ivana, who was on the right side of the photo. But Trump was pointing to the left.
That’s when Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, jumped in. “No,” she told her client, “that’s Carroll.”
As indeed it was. Trump had seen the photo and identified E. Jean Carroll, the woman who was “not his type” as his second wife Marla Maples. A bit later in the deposition, in order to put a fine point on it, Carroll’s attorneys asked him whether “the three women you’ve married were all your type.” Trump confirmed that they were.
One of the elements of the lawsuit filed by Carroll is an allegation that Trump defamed her by denying her allegations. That Trump was caught admitting — at least in the context of that one photo — that Carroll may well have been his type unquestionably undermined both his publicly offered defenses and his defense in the courtroom.
But there’s something else said during that deposition that introduces another interesting component to the situation.
After a bit more back-and-forth over the identities of the women in the photo, Habba again identified Carroll as Carroll.
“That’s Carroll?” Trump replied. “Because it’s very blurry.”
It was not so blurry that Habba wasn’t able to identify Carroll. Perhaps this was because she was intimately familiar with the picture. Or perhaps it’s because, for Habba, it wasn’t blurry — because she either doesn’t need glasses or was wearing a pair.
Trump both needs glasses and generally refuses to wear them. In the deposition video, he isn’t, perhaps understanding that the video of the deposition would eventually be made public.
The situation was reminiscent of a situation in 2014. That year, Trump was being sued by people who’d purchased properties from Trump in Florida. Sitting in the witness box, he was presented with a document to consider.
A photograph of Trump putting on reading glasses to view the document was published by the Orlando Sun-Sentinel. The caption beneath the photo read:
“Donald Trump borrows reading glasses from Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld to read a document during a civil case at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale brought by buyers of condos at Conrad Fort Lauderdale on Monday, March 10, 2014. Trump quipped that he should wear them all the time, but he’s ‘too vain.’ ”
That quote was noted in a 2019 Slate article by Ashley Feinberg considering the extent to which Trump’s gaffes as president might simply be a function of his refusal to correct his eyesight. Feinberg noted a 2016 Vice report considering why Trump was so often seen squinting.
“In general, it could just be because he’s trying to increase his vision,” an ophthalmologist who spoke with Vice said. “He could just be trying to compensate for some blurry vision.”
Trump has been seen wearing reading glasses at other times, too. In early 2020, New York Times photographer Doug Mills captured a photo of Trump, ensconced in the relative privacy of the presidential limousine, donning glasses to read something on his phone.
It’s possible that Trump corrects his vision in other ways, of course. Perhaps he’s had laser eye surgery or wears contacts. It’s also possible that the photo he was shown during the deposition was, in fact blurry.
It is also possible that Trump, by his own admission vain about being seen wearing glasses, declined to do so on the day Carroll’s lawyers called him in to answer questions. It’s possible that he severely damaged his defense in a high-stakes lawsuit by misidentifying the woman he insisted was too unattractive to draw his attention with the woman, Marla Maples, for whom he left Ivana Trump.
That latter scenario is one the ancient Greeks might have described as “hubris.”
