E Jean Carroll took the witness stand on Wednesday morning in her defamation trial against Donald Trump, marking the first time she confronted the ex-president in a courtroom.

“I’m here because Donald Trump assaulted me and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened,” Carroll testified. “He lied, and it shattered my reputation.

“I’m here to get my reputation back and to stop him from telling lies about me.”

When Carroll first took the stand, Trump could be seen whispering to his lead attorney, Alina Habba. He sat with slightly hunched shoulders as Carroll testified.

As Carroll testified, Trump complained audibly and appeared to double down on defamatory denials, her lawyer said during a morning break in the proceedings.

“Mr Trump has been sitting at the back table and has been loudly saying things throughout Ms Carroll’s testimony,” said attorney Shawn Crowley. They included claims that her comments were false and the statement: “She now seems to have gotten her memory back.”

“It’s loud enough for us to hear it,” Crowley said, so “I imagine it’s loud enough for the jury to hear it.”

Before court resumed after the break, Judge Lewis Kaplan cautioned: “I’m just going to ask Mr Trump to take special care to keep his voice down when conferring with counsel, so that the jury does not over-hear.”

Following Carroll’s initial remarks, one of her attorneys, Roberta Kaplan, asked the former Elle columnist questions about her career. Jurors heard how Carroll ascended from writing articles for high-profile publications to landing the columnist position, as well as a talkshow and authoring multiple books.

Trump, once again wearing a red tie, walked into the courtroom just before 10am.

Carroll is suing Trump over his June 2019 denials of her rape claim against him. This trial will determine damages.

Related: Trump used platform to tear E Jean Carroll’s name ‘to shreds’, court hears

This week’s proceedings mark Carroll’s second defamation trial against Trump. In May a jury found the former US president liable of sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carroll $5m in damages.

Trump attended jury selection in the trial. He left the courthouse around 2pm for a campaign event in New Hampshire and was not present for opening statements.

Carroll said that Trump raped her almost three decades ago, in the changing room of an upscale Manhattan department store. She came forward with her account in 2019 when an excerpt from her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, ran in New York magazine.

Trump, who was in the White House when Carroll’s claim surfaced, quickly attacked, saying: “I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.” Carroll sued him in 2019, maintaining that Trump’s denials smeared her reputation, sparking online abuse and serious threats.

During her testimony, Carroll explained the chain of events that unfolded after the excerpt ran. Carroll said she had never told anyone publicly about the incident.

She said that the fact that Trump was president did factor into her decision to go public: “I took the responsibility and went ahead and did it.”

Carroll said she expected him to respond but not in the way that he did.

“I expected to him to deny it, but to say it was consensual, when it was not, but that’s what I expected him to say.”

Is that what Trump did?

“No,” Carroll said.

Kaplan referred to the language in Trump’s denials.

“The thing that really got me about this was, from the White House, he asked if anyone had any information about me and if they did, to please come forward as soon as possible, because he wanted the world to know what’s really going on – and that people like me should pay dearly,” she recalled.

“Have you paid dearly, Ms Carroll?”

“I’ve paid just about as dearly as is possible to pay.”

Carroll was not able to sue Trump for sexual assault as the incident fell outside the civil statute of limitations. But in 2022, New York state’s Adult Survivors Act gave adult victims of sexual misconduct a one-year window to sue their alleged abusers for incidents outside this statute of limitations.

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Carroll sued him once again, this time citing sexual assault and defamation claims for statements Trump made when he was no longer president. Judge Lewis Kaplan determined the key facts in that case would be accepted in this second trial – Trump cannot relitigate Carroll’s rape claim.

Kaplan, in his instructions to jurors before opening statements, made this clear.

“Facts that were definitively decided in the previous trial include the following: first, Mr Trump, in fact, sexually abused Ms Carroll by forcibly and without her consent inserting his fingers into her vagina. Second, Mr Trump’s June 21 and June 22 statements were false. Ms Carroll did not make up her claim of forceable sexual abuse,” Kaplan said.

“And because you must accept them as true,” Kaplan later said, “this trial is not a do-over of the previous trial which determined those facts. What remains for you to decide are only two very limited issues relating to damages for Mr Trump’s publication of those two statements.”

Shawn Crowley, one of Carroll’s attorneys, said in her opening that jurors needed to impose damages that would stop Trump from continuing to smear her client.

“He is continuing to tell these lies to this very day – earlier this month, last week, even today. You will hear that as Donald Trump faces trial over how much money it will take to get him to stop defaming Ms Carroll, he keeps doing it. He sat in this courthouse. You saw him,” Crowley said.

“And while he was sitting there, he posted more defamatory statements, more lies about Ms Carroll and this case. By our count, by our last count, 22 posts, just today,” she said. “Think about that. Think about that when you consider how much money it will take to get him to stop.

“At the end of this trial, it will be your job to decide how much money Donald Trump should pay for what he’s done to Ms Carroll, and how much money he should pay, it will take, to get him to stop defaming her, so that Ms Carroll can maybe, finally, live her life in peace,” Crowley said.

“We submit that that number should be significant. Very significant. Donald Trump, after all, is a self-proclaimed billionaire.”

Trump’s lead attorney on this case, Alina Habba, contended that Carroll was responsible for the backlash against her.

“Ms Carroll had a duty to minimize the effect of the statements, not exacerbate them, as I will show she did when she ignored that duty and did the exact opposite and still does today,” Habba claimed.

She also insisted that Carroll liked the life she was living following Trump’s denials.

“The evidence will show that Ms Carroll has made Trump the focal point of her new identity now. We will show that she frequently promoted and publicized every development with her first lawsuit against him herself,” Habba claimed. “She doesn’t want to fix her reputation, ladies and gentlemen. She likes her new brand.”