While the former Hollywood mogul has been convicted of other sex crimes on two U.S. coasts and remains behind bars, the mistrial leaves the New York rape charge in limbo. Weinstein appeared expressionless as court officers ushered him out in his wheelchair.

The majority-male Manhattan jury had been weighing whether Weinstein raped Jessica Mann, a hairstylist and actor. Weinstein’s lawyers argued that the encounter was consensual. It happened in 2013 during a fraught relationship between the then-married Weinstein and the decades-younger Mann.

A juror, Josh Hadar, told reporters that he and eight others wanted to acquit Weinstein. He said Mann had an “incredible memory” when she testified for the prosecution but “forgot a lot of things” when questioned by defense attorneys.

Weinstein’s defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo called it “a great day for our jury system.”

Juror Sarae Perez, 25, said the threshold for a conviction — beyond a reasonable doubt — was on her mind.

“There were places where we couldn’t trust her word for it,” she said.

Mann said in a statement that the mistrial “doesn’t in any way detract from the truth I told.” She said she relived painful moments and faced public attacks while seeking justice because “the power of predators remains too great.”

No immediate decision about a fourth trial

Signs of a split jury emerged a few hours into their third day of deliberations, when they sent a note saying they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict. Judge Curtis Farber told them to keep trying, a common step when a jury first says it’s stuck.

More than an hour later, they sent another note saying: “We feel that no one is going to change where they stand.”

A hearing was set for June 24 to learn whether prosecutors will choose to go to a fourth trial. District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he was disappointed with the result but “we deeply respect the jury system.”

Bragg said his staff will consult Mann about another trial and also take into account what happens to Weinstein when he’s sentenced in another case. Mann was not in court when the mistrial was declared.

How the case returned for a third trial

As an Oscar-winning movie producer and studio boss, Weinstein was one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures and a significant Democratic donor before the long-suppressed sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against him cascaded into public view in 2017. The revelations galvanized the #MeToo movement ’s demands for accountability for sexual misconduct, made Weinstein a pariah, bankrupted the studio and ultimately led to criminal charges against him in New York and Los Angeles.

He was convicted of some and acquitted of others. Yet Mann’s allegation lingered. Weinstein was convicted of the charge in 2020. Then an appeals court overturned that verdict, and jury deliberations broke down at a 2025 retrial. That paved the way for this year’s retrial.

Weinstein has said he was unfaithful to his then-wife and “acted wrongly, but I never assaulted anyone.”

Jury heard from Weinstein’s accuser

Mann, now 40, met Weinstein at a Los Angeles party in early 2013, when she hoped to build a handful of acting credits into a big career. He took interest and soon showed that it wasn’t purely professional.

She said his initial, pushy overtures discomfited her, but she acceded to them and decided to develop a relationship with him.

She was staying with a friend at a Manhattan hotel in March 2013 when Weinstein showed up early for a planned breakfast and got a room over her objections, Mann testified. She said she accompanied Weinstein to the room to talk and made it clear she didn’t want sex.

“I said ‘no,’ over and over, and I tried to leave,” she told jurors during five days of intense testimony.

She said that Weinstein blocked her from leaving and grabbed her arms. Scared, she gave up protesting, complied with his demands to undress, and laid on a bed while he went into a bathroom, she told jurors. Then, Mann said, he raped her.

Mann told no one for years about the alleged rape. Nor did she mention it in her introspective, private writing two days later. In a note to herself, she grappled with conflicted feelings about becoming “emotionally attached” in a nonexclusive relationship with a man she didn’t name.

After Weinstein’s new lawyers confronted Mann with the note, she said she hadn’t needed to write down the allegation.

The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted, unless they choose to make their names public, as Mann has done.

Weinstein defense: Mann was supportive

Weinstein didn’t testify. In his lawyers’ telling, Mann was a willing partner in a close, supportive relationship with a show-business insider who opened doors for her, but she turned on him once he became an outcast.

In the months and years after the New York encounter, Mann kept seeing and communicating with Weinstein.

At times, she pulled away to pursue and preserve a relationship with a new boyfriend, according to her emails and testimony. At other times, she turned back to Weinstein, who validated her acting dreams, told her he was proud of her and responded caringly when her father was terminally ill.

“I love u. Anything u need,” Weinstein wrote.

Over the years, he helped Mann land a movie audition — it went nowhere — and a hairstyling job. She asked him for help with such things as a car problem and a club membership, though she declined a package his office tried to send in summer 2013, when she couldn’t make rent. Mann said she understood the envelope contained $1,000 in cash.

In one of her last emails to Weinstein, in February 2017, she wrote: “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call.” When he responded by suggesting she was “joking” and should stop using his company email, she said it was a joke and apologized.

Eight months later, she saw the news reports that propelled his downfall and ultimately prompted her to go to police.

Mann never sued Weinstein, but after his 2020 conviction, she filed for and got about $500,000 from a sexual misconduct settlement fund set up during his company’s bankruptcy. The payout was mentioned at last year’s retrial, but the defense didn’t raise it this time after extensive arguments about what could and couldn’t be said.

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A Jan. 10 trial date was scheduled Friday for a 23- year-old probationer accused of fatally beating a Riverside senior after breaking into her home.

Sixto Jesus Garcia Pena of Palm Springs was arrested in 2021 following a Riverside Police Department investigation into the slaying of 78-year-old Denise Irene Wong.

Pena is charged with first-degree murder, as well as special- circumstance allegations of killing in the commission of a robbery, killing in the commission of a burglary and inflicting torture.

Prosecutors intend to seek capital punishment if the defendant is convicted.

During a status hearing at the Riverside Hall of Justice Friday, Superior Court Judge Matthew Perantoni conferred with the prosecution and defense regarding future proceedings, and both sides agreed to be prepared to move forward with trial at the beginning of next year.

An intervening hearing is set for Oct. 25 to confirm everything is on track.

Pena is being held without bail at the Robert Presley Detention Center.

Pena was located in mid-January 2021 at the Imperial County Jail, where he was awaiting adjudication of an unrelated attempted vehicle theft case, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Riverside police detectives served an arrest warrant there, then transferred him to the downtown Riverside jail.

According to Riverside police Officer Ryan Railsback, Pena allegedly killed Wong in her single-story house in the 1200 block of East Manfield Street, near Masters Avenue, on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Denise was a loving mother, grandmother, sister, friend and a good and kind person,” police Chief Larry Gonzalez said after Pena’s arrest.

The victim had been a resident of the city for five decades.

Patrol officers were called to her home that evening after her loved ones requested a welfare check because she hadn’t responded to phone calls. She was found dead from injuries inflicted a few hours earlier, Railsback said.

He alleged Pena accessed the residence by breaking a rear window.

“Officers observed some items … out of place and consistent with a burglary,” the police spokesman said, adding that the victim’s car had been stolen.

Detectives confirmed the sedan was involved in a hit-and-run collision in Indio a few hours after the alleged break-in.

Indio police impounded the abandoned vehicle, and homicide investigators went to the impound yard, collecting evidence from the car that helped them identify Pena as the alleged assailant, Railsback said.

Three days later, with the help of the county’s Gang Impact Team, they confirmed Pena had been arrested in Imperial County, and arrangements were made for his transfer.

According to court records, Pena has prior convictions for child abuse, auto theft and receiving stolen property.

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The lawyers filed papers with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking a three-judge panel to reverse his conviction and assign the case to a new judge for a retrial, saying the trial judge “imposed a draconian quarter-century sentence on this first-time, non-violent offender” after they contend he hurried the jury into reaching a one-day verdict to cap off a complex four-week trial.

“Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent. He was presumed guilty — before he was even charged. He was presumed guilty by the media. He was presumed guilty by the FTX debtor estate and its lawyers. He was presumed guilty by federal prosecutors eager for quick headlines. And he was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial,” the lawyers wrote.

They said the passing of time has cast Bankman-Fried in a better light.

“From day one, the prevailing narrative — initially spun by the lawyers who took over FTX, quickly adopted by their contacts at the U.S. Attorney’s Office — was that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions of dollars of customer funds, driven FTX to insolvency, and caused billions in losses,” the attorney said.

“Now, nearly two years later, a very different picture is emerging — one confirming FTX was never insolvent, and in fact had assets worth billions to repay its customers. But the jury at Bankman-Fried’s trial never got to see that picture,” they added.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted last November of fraud and conspiracy a year after his companies collapsed into bankruptcy as investors rushed to withdraw funds. A jury concluded that some of their money had been improperly spent on real estate, investments, celebrity endorsements, political contributions and lavish lifestyles.

At its height, FTX was treated as a pioneer and darling in the emerging cryptocurrency industry, with a Super Bowl advertisement, testimony by Bankman-Fried before Congress and endorsements from celebrities such as quarterback Tom Brady and comedian Larry David.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in December 2022 following his extradition from the Bahamas, just weeks after his company filed for bankruptcy and days after some of his former top executives began cooperating with federal prosecutors. Some of them testified against him at trial.

He initially remained under strict bail conditions at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan revoked his bail shortly before the trial after concluding that Bankman-Fried was trying to influence likely witnesses, including an ex-girlfriend who had served as chief executive at Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund.

The fallen mogul is serving a 25-year sentence after he was sentenced in March in what a prosecutor once described as one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

A prosecutor’s spokesperson declined to comment Friday.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Jack Smith urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to let former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case proceed to trial without further delay.

Prosecutors were responding to a Trump team request from earlier in the week asking for a continued pause in the case as the court considers whether to take up the question of whether the former president is immune from prosecution for official acts in the White House. Two lower courts have overwhelmingly rejected that position, prompting Trump to ask the high court to intervene.

The case — one of four criminal prosecutions confronting Trump — has reached a critical juncture, with the Supreme Court’s next step capable of helping determine whether Trump stands trial this year in Washington or whether the proceedings are going to be postponed by weeks or months of additional arguments.

The trial date, already postponed once by Trump’s immunity appeal, is of paramount importance to both sides. Prosecutors are looking to bring Trump to trial this year while defense lawyers have been seeking delays in his criminal cases. If Trump were to be elected with the case pending, he could presumably use his authority as head of the executive branch to order the Justice Department to dismiss it or could potentially seek to pardon himself.

Reflecting their desire to proceed quickly, prosecutors responded to Trump’s appeal within two days even though the court had given them until next Tuesday.

Though their filing does not explicitly mention the upcoming November election or Trump’s status as the Republican primary front-runner, prosecutors described the case as having “unique national importance” and said that “delay in the resolution of these charges threatens to frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict.”

“The national interest in resolving those charges without further delay is compelling,” they wrote.

Smith’s team charged Trump in August with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including by participating in a scheme to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when his supporters stormed the building in a violent clash with police.

“The charged crimes strike at the heart of our democracy. A President’s alleged criminal scheme to overturn an election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power to his successor should be the last place to recognize a novel form of absolute immunity from federal criminal law,” they wrote.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that he is shielded from prosecution for acts that fell within his official duties as president — a legally untested argument since no other former president has been indicted.

The trial judge and then a federal appeals court rejected those arguments, with a three-judge appeals panel last week saying, “We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”

The proceedings have been effectively frozen by Trump’s immunity appeal, with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan canceling a March 4 trial date while the appeals court considered the matter. No new date has been set.

Trump’s appeal and request for the Supreme Court to get involved could cause further delays depending on what the justices decide. In December, Smith and his team had urged the justices to take up and decide the immunity issue, even before the appeals court weighed in. But the court declined.

The Supreme Court’s options include rejecting the emergency appeal, which would enable Chutkan to restart the trial proceedings in Washington’s federal court. The court also could extend the delay while it hears arguments on the immunity issue. In that event, the schedule the justices set could determine how soon a trial might begin, if indeed they agree with lower court rulings that Trump is not immune from prosecution.

On Wednesday, prosecutors urged the court to reject Trump’s petition to hear the case, saying that lower court opinions rejecting immunity for the former president “underscore how remote the possibility is that this Court will agree with his unprecedented legal position.”

But if the court does wants to decide the matter, Smith said, the justices should hear arguments in March and issue a final ruling by late June.

Prosecutors also pushed back against Trump’s argument that allowing the case to proceed could chill future presidents’ actions for fear they could be criminally charged once they leave office and open the door to politically motivated cases against former commanders-in-chief.

“That dystopian vision runs contrary to the checks and balances built into our institutions and the framework of the Constitution,” they wrote. “Those guardrails ensure that the legal process for determining criminal liability will not be captive to ‘political forces,’ as applicant forecasts.”

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A prosecutor began cross-examining Sam Bankman-Fried at a New York City trial on Monday, attacking his credibility by highlighting public statements he made before and after the FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded filed for bankruptcy late last year when it could no longer process billions of dollars in withdrawals.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Danielle Sassoon confronted Bankman-Fried with instances in which he’d promised customers that their assets would be safe and that they could demand those assets be returned at any time.

Repeatedly, Bankman-Fried answered the series of questions with a rapid “Yep.”

Bankman-Fried, 31, has been on trial for the last month on charges that he defrauded his customers and investors of billions of dollars. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that carry a potential penalty of decades in prison.

The California man gained a level of fame from 2017 to 2022 as he created the Alameda Research hedge fund and FTX, building a cryptocurrency empire that became worth tens of billions of dollars. For a time, he seemed to be transforming the emerging industry by conforming to his publicly stated vision of a more regulated and safe environment for users.

Through her line of questioning, Sassoon tried to show that Bankman-Fried’s public statements were false and that he promised customers that their accounts were safe while he looted them, spending lavishly on real estate, celebrity-laden promotions, investments and political contributions.

In one instance, she asked him if he’d used profanity in speaking about regulators — even as he was trying to persuade Congress to bring more legitimacy to the cryptocurrency industry by setting up a regulatory framework.

“I said that once,” he answered when she offered a specific example.

And when Sassoon asked if his pursuit of regulations was just an attempt at garnering positive public relations, he answered: “I said something related to that, yes.”

Before cross-examination began on Monday, Bankman-Fried testified that he believed his companies could withstand the daily withdrawal of billions of dollars in assets until several days before they could not.

Bankman-Fried was arrested last December on fraud charges. Initially freed on a $250-million personal recognizance bond to live with his parents in Palo Alto, he was jailed in August when Judge Lewis A. Kaplan became convinced that he had tried to tamper with potential trial witnesses.

He began testifying on Thursday. Kaplan has told jurors that the trial might be completed as early as this week.

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Aggrieved and defiant, former President Donald Trump spent a day in court Monday for the sometimes testy start of a trial in a fraud lawsuit that could cost him control of Trump Tower and other prized properties. “Disgraceful trial,” he declared during a lunch break, after listening to lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James excoriate him as a habitual liar.

The state’s lawsuit accuses the business mogul-turned-politician and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by misstating his wealth for years in financial statements. “They were lying year after year after year,” Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in James’ office, said as Trump sat at the defense table.

He looked straight ahead, arms crossed, facing away from a screen that showed details of Wallace’s presentation. Trump denies wrongdoing and voluntarily attended a trial that he called a “sham,” a “scam,” a waste of the state’s time and “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.” Currently the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, he reiterated claims that James, a Democrat, is trying to thwart his bid to return to the White House. “What we have here is an attempt to hurt me in an election,” he said outside court, adding, “I don’t think the people of this country are going to stand for it.”

Trump sneered at James as he passed her on his way out at lunchtime; she left smiling. Meanwhile, his campaign immediately began fundraising off the appearance. But Trump left for the day claiming he’d scored a victory, pointing to comments that he viewed as Judge Arthur Engoron coming around to the defense view that most of the suit’s allegations are too old.

The judge suggested that testimony about Trump’s 2011 financial statement was beyond the legal time limit. Wallace promised to link it to a more recent loan agreement, but Trump took the judge’s remarks as an “outstanding” development for him. Engoron ruled last week that Trump committed fraud in his business dealings. If upheld on appeal, the ruling could force Trump to give up New York properties including Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building, golf courses and a suburban estate.

Trump has called it a “a corporate death penalty” and insisted the judge, a Democrat, is unfair and out to get him. The non-jury trial concerns six remaining claims in the lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. Engoron said that neither side sought a jury and that state law doesn’t allow for juries when suits seek not only money but a court order setting out something a defendant must do or not do.

James is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York. “No matter how powerful you are, and no matter how much money you think you have, no one is above the law,” she said on her way into the courthouse. Trump says that James and the judge are undervaluing such assets as his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

He and his lawyers also maintain that disclaimers on his financial statements made clear that they were estimates and that banks would have to perform their own analysis. The former president, his two eldest sons, Trump Organization executives and fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen are all listed among dozens of potential witnesses. Trump isn’t expected to testify for several weeks. His trip to court Monday marked a remarkable departure from his past practice.

Trump didn’t go to court as either a witness or a spectator when his company and one of its top executives was convicted of tax fraud last year. He didn’t show, either, for a civil trial earlier this year in which a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. This time, “I wanted to watch this witch hunt myself,” he said outside court. In a recent court filing, James’ office alleged Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion.

He claimed his three-story Trump Tower penthouse, replete with gold-plated fixtures, was nearly three times its actual size and worth $327 million, far more than any New York City apartment ever has fetched, James said. He valued Mar-a-Lago as high as $739 million — more than 10 times a more reasonable estimate of its worth, James maintained. “Every estimate was determined by Mr. Trump,” Wallace said in his opening statement.

He pointed to pretrial testimony by Trump Organization figures and ex-insiders including Cohen, who said the company estimated assets to get to a predetermined number “that Mr. Trump wanted.” Wallace said the alleged scheme got the company better loan rates, saving it $100 million in interest. “They hid their weaknesses and convinced these banks to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in risk,” he said, adding, “While the defendants can exaggerate to Forbes magazine or on television, they cannot do it while conducting business in the state of New York.”

Defense lawyers said the financial statements were legitimate representations of prime properties that can command top dollar. “That is not fraud. That is real estate,” attorney Alina Habba said in an opening statement. She accused the attorney general’s office of “setting a very dangerous precedent for all business owners in the state of New York.” Defense experts will testify that valuing properties is subjective, Trump attorneys said. He and his lawyers have also argued that no one was harmed by anything in the financial statements, which were given to banks to secure loans and to financial magazines to justify his place among the world’s billionaires.

Banks that made loans to him were fully repaid. Business partners made money. And Trump’s own company flourished. Defense lawyer Christopher Kise blasted last week’s fraud ruling, telling the judge he shouldn’t have made a decision before hearing expert trial testimony on property valuations. Engoron, tiring of the defense’s criticism, shot back: “Respectfully, what’s that expression? You’re stalking the dead horse here.” Testimony began Monday afternoon with Donald Bender, a longtime partner at accounting firm Mazars LLP, describing how he spent 50 to 60 hours a year preparing Trump’s financial statements.

Mazars cut ties with Trump last year after James’ office raised questions about the documents’ reliability. James’ lawsuit is one of several legal headaches for Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House. He has been indicted four times since March, accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, hoarding classified documents and falsifying business records related to hush money paid on his behalf.

He has pleaded not guilty to all the allegations. The New York fraud trial is expected to last into December, Engoron said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor opened a fraud trial Wednesday by telling jurors that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was on top of the world a year ago, hobnobbing with celebrities, before his historic fraud was exposed, leaving customers and investors without at least $10 billion they thought was secure. A defense lawyer insisted his client didn’t steal from anyone.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Rehn repeatedly pointed at Bankman-Fried, sitting with his lawyers in a suit, and accused him of “committing a massive fraud.”

He said Bankman-Fried told lies to his investors while he spent their money on himself, his friends and family, buying lavish homes and beachfront property in the Bahamas, spending millions of dollars on political donations to gain influence in Washington.

Bankman-Fried, 31, maintains he was not to blame for a massive fraud that prosecutors allege in seven charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy, brought against him since his arrest last December in the Bahamas. In court Wednesday, he sat with a water bottle and a laptop computer in front of him.

They say the California man defrauded thousands of investors and customers in his businesses of billions of dollars by siphoning off their money for his own uses, including financing his businesses and making big political contributions to try to influence government regulation of cryptocurrency.

Defense lawyers insist their client had no criminal intent as he became famous in the crypto world while growing FTX and a related business, Alameda Research, into multibillion dollar heavyweights in the cryptocurrency industry.

Defense attorney Mark Cohen, in his opening statement, insisted that his client had “a very different story” to tell than prosecutors about what happened as Bankman-Fried built his cryptocurrency empire between 2017 and 2022.

“Sam didn’t defraud anyone, didn’t intend to defraud anyone,” he told jurors.

He called Bankman-Fried a “math nerd who didn’t drink or party,” someone who launched his businesses after being educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working on Wall Street for several years.

Cohen said Bankman-Fried’s actions in the final days as head of his companies prove that he believed he was managing a liquidity crisis caused by cryptocurrency values that collapsed by over 70 percent and criticism from one of his biggest competitors that caused a run on his companies by customers seeking to recover their deposits.

Seated in the first row at the trial was U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who said months ago that the fraud surrounding FTX was one of the biggest in U.S. history.

Bankman-Fried became a target of investigators when FTX collapsed last November amid a rush of customers seeking to recover their deposits, less than a year after Bankman-Fried spent millions of dollars on the 2022 Super Bowl with celebrity advertisements promoting FTX as the “safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto.”

Comedian Larry David, along with other celebrities such as football quarterback Tom Brady and basketball star Stephen Curry, have been named in a lawsuit that argued their celebrity status made them culpable for promoting the firm’s failed business model.

Bankman-Fried was extradited to the United States from the Bahamas after his arrest last December.

He was first ordered to remain at home with his parents in Palo Alto, California, as part of a $250 million bail package, but his bond was revoked and he was jailed in August after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan concluded he’d tried to influence trial witnesses.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Aggrieved and defiant, former President Donald Trump spent a day in court Monday for the sometimes testy start of a trial in a fraud lawsuit that could cost him control of Trump Tower and other prized properties.

“Disgraceful trial,” he declared during a lunch break, after listening to lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James excoriate him as a habitual liar. The state’s lawsuit accuses the business mogul-turned-politician and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by misstating his wealth for years in financial statements.

“They were lying year after year after year,” Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in James’ office, said as Trump sat at the defense table. He looked straight ahead, arms crossed, facing away from a screen that showed details of Wallace’s presentation.

Trump denies wrongdoing and voluntarily attended a trial that he called a “sham,” a “scam,” a waste of the state’s time and “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.” Currently the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, he reiterated claims that James, a Democrat, is trying to thwart his bid to return to the White House.

“What we have here is an attempt to hurt me in an election,” he said outside court, adding, “I don’t think the people of this country are going to stand for it.”

Trump sneered at James as he passed her on his way out at lunchtime; she left smiling. Meanwhile, his campaign immediately began fundraising off the appearance.

But Trump left for the day claiming he’d scored a victory, pointing to comments that he viewed as Judge Arthur Engoron coming around to the defense view that most of the suit’s allegations are too old.

The judge suggested that testimony about Trump’s 2011 financial statement was beyond the legal time limit. Wallace promised to link it to a more recent loan agreement, but Trump took the judge’s remarks as an “outstanding” development for him.

Engoron ruled last week that Trump committed fraud in his business dealings. If upheld on appeal, the ruling could force Trump to give up New York properties including Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building, golf courses and a suburban estate. Trump has called it a “a corporate death penalty” and insisted the judge, a Democrat, is unfair and out to get him.

The non-jury trial concerns six remaining claims in the lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. Engoron said that neither side sought a jury and that state law doesn’t allow for juries when suits seek not only money but a court order setting out something a defendant must do or not do.

James is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.

“No matter how powerful you are, and no matter how much money you think you have, no one is above the law,” she said on her way into the courthouse.

Trump says that James and the judge are undervaluing such assets as his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He and his lawyers also maintain that disclaimers on his financial statements made clear that they were estimates and that banks would have to perform their own analysis.

The former president, his two eldest sons, Trump Organization executives and fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen are all listed among dozens of potential witnesses.

Trump isn’t expected to testify for several weeks. His trip to court Monday marked a remarkable departure from his past practice.

Trump didn’t go to court as either a witness or a spectator when his company and one of its top executives was convicted of tax fraud last year. He didn’t show, either, for a civil trial earlier this year in which a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

This time, “I wanted to watch this witch hunt myself,” he said outside court.

In a recent court filing, James’ office alleged Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion.

He claimed his three-story Trump Tower penthouse, replete with gold-plated fixtures, was nearly three times its actual size and worth $327 million, far more than any New York City apartment ever has fetched, James said. He valued Mar-a-Lago as high as $739 million — more than 10 times a more reasonable estimate of its worth, James maintained.

“Every estimate was determined by Mr. Trump,” Wallace said in his opening statement. He pointed to pretrial testimony by Trump Organization figures and ex-insiders including Cohen, who said the company estimated assets to get to a predetermined number “that Mr. Trump wanted.”

Wallace said the alleged scheme got the company better loan rates, saving it $100 million in interest.

“They hid their weaknesses and convinced these banks to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in risk,” he said, adding, “While the defendants can exaggerate to Forbes magazine or on television, they cannot do it while conducting business in the state of New York.”

Defense lawyers said the financial statements were legitimate representations of prime properties that can command top dollar.

“That is not fraud. That is real estate,” attorney Alina Habba said in an opening statement. She accused the attorney general’s office of “setting a very dangerous precedent for all business owners in the state of New York.”

Defense experts will testify that valuing properties is subjective, Trump attorneys said. He and his lawyers have also argued that no one was harmed by anything in the financial statements, which were given to banks to secure loans and to financial magazines to justify his place among the world’s billionaires.

Banks that made loans to him were fully repaid. Business partners made money. And Trump’s own company flourished.

Defense lawyer Christopher Kise blasted last week’s fraud ruling, telling the judge he shouldn’t have made a decision before hearing expert trial testimony on property valuations. Engoron, tiring of the defense’s criticism, shot back: “Respectfully, what’s that expression? You’re stalking the dead horse here.”

Testimony began Monday afternoon with Donald Bender, a longtime partner at accounting firm Mazars LLP, describing how he spent 50 to 60 hours a year preparing Trump’s financial statements. Mazars cut ties with Trump last year after James’ office raised questions about the documents’ reliability.

James’ lawsuit is one of several legal headaches for Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House. He has been indicted four times since March, accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, hoarding classified documents and falsifying business records related to hush money paid on his behalf. He has pleaded not guilty to all the allegations.

The New York fraud trial is expected to last into December, Engoron said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A magazine columnist who says Donald Trump raped her in a department store’s dressing room two decades before he became president acknowledged Monday that she never followed her own advice to readers that they report sexual attacks to police.

E. Jean Carroll told a federal civil court jury that the reason was generational.

The 79-year-old said that as “a member of the Silent Generation,” she was conditioned to keep her chin up and not to complain.

“The fact that I never went to the police is not surprising for somebody my age,” she testified as Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina cross-examined Carroll about why she never went to authorities about the alleged rape, which Trump denies. Carroll said she had called police only once in her life, when she feared the mailbox at a home where she was staying was going to be damaged on Halloween.

“You would call police if a mailbox was attacked,” Tacopina asked, “but not if you yourself were attacked?”

Carroll replied that at the time, she was ashamed of what she alleges happened. She later added that she was mindful of Trump’s power and connections in New York and “didn’t think police would take me seriously.”

Research has repeatedly found that rapes and sexual assaults are among the types of violent crime least likely to be reported to police. An annual U.S. crime victimization survey found that less than 23% of rapes and sexual assaults were reported in 2021 and 2020, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Carroll on Monday wrapped up three days of testimony in the trial stemming from her lawsuit against Trump. The trial is due to continue Tuesday with other witnesses on her behalf. Trump, who traveled to Scotland on Monday to open a new golf course at his resort near Aberdeen, Scotland, has not attended the trial. Jurors are expected to see parts of a recording of him answering questions under oath last fall.

Carroll has said the then-real estate magnate raped her in the spring of 1996 at the tony Bergdorf Goodman store after they went into a dressing room together in an encounter that she said was fun and flirtatious until Trump became violent. She said she eventually kneed him and fled.

Trump, 76, says that he was never at the store with Carroll and never knew her beyond a fleeting moment when a 1987 picture was taken of them in a group setting.

Shortly before Carroll first took the stand last week, Trump called the rape accusation “a fraudulent & false story” on his social media platform.

Seeking to cast Carroll’s allegation as fiction, Tacopina on Monday brought up a 2012 episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” in which a male character briefly speaks about consensually acting out a sexual fantasy that involves bursting in on a woman trying on lingerie in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Jurors saw an email in which someone mentioned the episode to Carroll after she went public with her claim in 2019.

Carroll testified that she has never seen the episode, didn’t know about it before receiving the email and didn’t make up her accusation off TV. She said she wasn’t entirely surprised at the points of similarity.

“The ‘Law & Order’ writers are very good about keying into the psyches of their viewers,” said Carroll, asserting that many people have misplaced fantasies about rape.

Her renewed testimony came shortly after Tacopina asked Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who is overseeing the civil proceedings, to declare a mistrial because of rulings he made that Tacopina said favored Carroll. The judge rejected the request.

Carroll filed suit against Trump in November, under a New York state law that temporarily allows sexual assault victims to sue over alleged attacks that happened even decades ago.

Amid a flurry of public denials and insults from Trump that prompted Carroll to add a defamation claim to the lawsuit, Trump has insisted that Carroll was motivated by political reasons and a desire to sell copies of her 2019 memoir.

Carroll has testified that she spoke out because of the #MeToo movement, which gained prominence in 2017.

Carroll wrote an advice column for Elle magazine for nearly three decades, and Tacopina confronted her Monday with instances in which she advised contacting law enforcement authorities after people wrote in about sexual assaults and threats from partners and exes.

“I always — in most cases — advised my readers to go to the police,” Carroll acknowledged.

Tacopina also pointed out that although Carroll’s memoir described sexual assaults by multiple men over the course of her life, Trump was the only one she sued. And, although Trump has insisted he had no sexual encounter — indeed, “no anything” — with Carroll, his attorney asked her whether what allegedly happened could “somehow be viewed as consensual.”

“It was not consensual,” she said emphatically.

The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump’s behavior toward women, long a source of flashpoints in his political career, now faces a new level of scrutiny: a trial in a lawsuit accusing him of rape.

Jury selection is set to start Tuesday in the case filed by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in a luxury New York department store dressing room in the 1990s.

Trump, who is unlikely to attend the trial, has called the accusations “a complete con job.” Carroll, who is seeking unspecified damages, casts the case as a #MeToo-inspired quest for accountability from the epitome of prominent men.

“I’m filing this lawsuit not just for myself but for every woman in America who has been grabbed, groped, harassed, sexually assaulted and has spoken up and still has been disgraced, shamed or fired,” Carroll said early on.

The lawsuit is putting Trump’s history with women under a microscope as he runs to return to the White House. But if a trial over a rape accusation would be a crisis for most candidates, with Trump, it remains to be seen.

“To the extent that the chaos around Trump is his biggest challenge, this reinforces that narrative,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “The No. 1 thing I hear in focus groups of Republican voters is that they’re tired of the constant drama that comes with Trump.”

Trump’s political rise was riddled with criticism of his attitudes and conduct toward women. There were his insulting remarks about onetime Republican rival Carly Fiorina’s appearance, his misogynistic comments about former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, his double-down on denigrating a former Miss Universe whom he had pilloried about her weight and more — including, most notoriously, the crass “Access Hollywood” hot-mic recording that nearly derailed his 2016 campaign and elicited rare contrition for what he called “locker room banter.”

Then there were the dozen-plus women, including Carroll, who came forward during his campaign and presidency to accuse him of sexual assault and harassment. He denied all the claims. Other lawsuits over them were dropped or dismissed, but Carroll’s has endured.

If Trump prevails in the case, he will likely tout it as another example of him beating what he sees as spurious claims about him, Conant said. If Trump loses, the impact could depend on the circumstances of the judgment. Carroll is seeking unspecified damages and a retraction of Trump’s denials of her allegations.

Trump has aimed to use his other legal troubles — including a recent, unrelated indictment and ongoing investigations into other matters — to bolster his support among fellow Republicans, painting the various probes as a politically motivated “witch hunt” and a broad attempt to “interfere” with the 2024 election. It’s unclear whether the voters he seeks to reach will sympathize with his portrayal of Carroll’s lawsuit as a pile-on, see it as a growing distraction or ignore it altogether.

His campaign saw a spike in donations after his indictment, which accuses him of fudging his company’s records to try to conceal payments made to suppress stories about his alleged marital infidelity; he denies the charges and the sexual encounters.

His favorability ratings have held steady at 34% among U.S. adults overall and 68% among Republicans, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Beyond its political ramifications, the trial marks a #MeToo milestone, even after closely watched civil and criminal cases against disgraced movie honcho Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men. The case also is drawing national attention to a New York law that allows for lawsuits over decades-old sex crime claims.

The time frame for pursuing criminal charges over the allegations, which Carroll never reported to police, has long since passed. If she prevails in the lawsuit, it could cost Trump money but not his freedom.

A former magazine journalist, talk show host and “Saturday Night Live” writer, Carroll was best known — at least until her lawsuit — for the eponymous advice column she wrote for Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019.

According to Carroll, she crossed paths with Trump at Bergdorf Goodman sometime in 1995 or 1996, when he was a real estate mogul and man about town. Recognizing her as “that advice lady,” he asked her to help him browse for a women’s gift, bantered with Carroll about a bodysuit and steered her to a fitting room, she says. Then, in her telling, he suddenly forced himself on her while she tried to push him off.

“That rape changed my life, which is shocking for me to now understand,” she said in a deposition, a legal term for pretrial questioning under oath.

According to Carroll, she immediately lost interest in dating and desire, then lost her job after she told her story in a 2019 memoir and Trump responded that she was “totally lying.” Elle has said her contract wasn’t renewed for unrelated reasons.

Trump says he never encountered Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman and had no idea who she was when she publicly accused him. He has asserted that she invented the story to sell her book.

“It’s a false accusation. Never happened, never would happen,” he said during a caustic 5 1/2-hour deposition, which can be played for jurors.

In snippets released to date, he called Carroll a “nut job,” her attorney “a disgrace” and the case “a big, fat hoax.” He reiterated his description of Carroll as “not my type” — and misidentified her in a 1987 photo as Marla Maples, his wife from 1993 to 1999.

Besides Carroll, two Trump accusers who never sued are set to testify in Carroll’s case.

Jessica Leeds has said Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt when they were seatmates on a flight three decades ago. People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff has said Trump forcibly kissed her against her will while showing her around his Florida home for a 2005 article.

Jurors also are expected to hear the “Access Hollywood” recording.

The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly.

The trial will unfold at a federal courthouse a block from the state court where Trump was arraigned earlier this month on his indictment.

___

Associated Press writer Michelle Price contributed to this report.

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