Last time Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina called a rape accuser greedy and crazy he won. It's a different world now.

• Joe Tacopina is defending Donald Trump at trial against E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation claims.
• Tacopina won his last big rape case by telling jurors the accuser was mentally troubled and out for money.

When confronting rape accusers in court, Joe Tacopina — Donald Trump's pugilist lawyer in the ongoing E. Jean Carroll trial — does not wear kid gloves.

Boxing gloves are more like it.

Twelve years ago, Tacopina defended an NYPD cop accused of the on-duty rape of a woman so intoxicated, her taxi driver called 911 because she couldn't get out of the cab.

Tacopina's offensive against this 28-year-old woman was brutal, relentless, and successful.

By the time he won an acquittal in a high-profile, 2011 Manhattan criminal trial, Tacopina had attacked what he called her "functional tolerance" for alcohol.

"She walked up five flights of stairs in high heels," from the cab to her East Village, Manhattan apartment, as the officers escorted her home, Tacopina said in closing arguments. "Don't try that experiment at home," he added, to juror laughter.

Also noted by the defense were the unidentified semen stains found on the woman's mattress and pillow sham, evidence used to suggest she slept around and to bolster the cop's insistence that between her bouts of vomiting and unconsciousness, she had stripped down to only her bra and tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce him.

"We're not doing this," the cop testified he'd told the woman, rebuffing her advances.

I covered the case for the New York Post, and I recall these particularly ugly attacks — she's sexually active, she's a functional drunk, the kind of accusations that are juror kryptonite today, in a post-#MeToo world — to show how Tacopina plays rough to win.

Fast forward a dozen years and Tacopina is under a brighter spotlight as he labors to protect Trump — a former and would-be United States president — from a 79-year-old advice columnist.

Carroll alleges that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a luxury Manhattan department store, Bergdorf Goodman, back in the mid-90s, then called her a liar after she made that accusation in 2019, in New York magazine and a memoir, "What Do We Need Men For?"

In fighting Carroll's civil claims of battery and defamation, Tacopina is again playing rough, saying that in 2019 that, out of greed and political bias, Carroll and her friends concocted a "story" about her being "supposedly" raped.

"She wanted to become a celebrity, which she has, by the way," Tacopina told jurors, all nine of whom indeed walk past a fleet of TV trucks and news cameras on entering the federal courthouse each day.

But will another all-out, guns-blazing attack on the motives and mental health of a sympathetic, tearful rape accuser work in 2023 Manhattan?

Calling his client's accuser greedy — and a little crazy — may have raised reasonable doubt 12 years ago. But this is a civil case, where the level of proof is lower: a mere preponderance of the evidence.

And this time around, the defendant is Trump, a man already unpopular in Manhattan, where just 12% of the electorate voted for him, and whose history of behavior with other women will also be weighed by jurors.

There's also this difference: Carroll is, quite arguably, killing it so far in two days on the witness stand, deftly confronting and defusing the more perplexing elements of her account.

Why did you wait so long — more than 20 years — to come forward, Tacopina asked her on Thursday.

"I saw other women coming forward after Harvey Weinstein and I thought, who am I? Who am I to stay silent?" she answered.

Why didn't you scream in the dressing room, Tacopina asked.

"Here's the thing," she told him. "I was too much in a panic to screech. I was fighting," she said of what she described as three minutes of mute hell.

"You can't beat up on me for not screaming," she warned Tacopina, meeting his look as they faced each other across the courtroom.

"I'm not beating up on you," Tacopina protested. "I'm asking you questions, Ms. Carroll."

"No," she shot back.

"Women who come forward, one of the reasons they don't come forward is because they are always asked why didn't you scream. Some women scream. Some women don't. It keeps women silent," she told him.

"I'm telling you," she added at another point, her voice firm. "He raped me, whether I screamed or not."

Then there's #MeToo itself.

"It's been risky for some time to attack victims of sexual assault," a former Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor told me recently, asking not to be quoted by name.

"Jurors hate it," the ex-prosecutor added. "But it would be malpractice not to attack a ridiculous narrative."

Carroll told jurors that after running into Trump by chance, she agreed, as part of what started as a playful back-and-forth, to help him pick out lingerie for a "friend."

A second former Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor, who also asked not to be named, agreed the story is problematic.

"I think it's dangerous to make the attack — that she's crazy — too emphatically," this second prosecutor said. "But I mean, the story is odd," they said of Carroll's account.

"Playing with a guy verbally, to the point where you go into the dressing room, and then make no outcry. There's room to make her look bad, if you do it gently," they said.

"But in these #MeToo times, it's just really as likely that will not play," they added. Especially in a he-said, she-said sex case, vilifying a rape accuser "continues to be a crap shoot" with juries, they said.

Which leads to the most interesting parallel between Tacopina's two rape-case defense strategies. Both cases boil down to the accused's word (it didn't happen) against the accuser's (it most certainly did happen), with no forensics or eye-witness to break the he-she impasse.

This has allowed Tacopina, then and now, to offer his own spin on the woman's story and then attack that version as beyond belief.

Twelve years ago, jurors heard a prosecution case about a young woman who awoke from an almost entirely blacked-out evening, with only a few distinct moments surviving, like strobe-light flashes seared into her mind's eye.

She remembered the sound, inexplicable to her, of Velcro ripping, she told jurors. In first describing that distinctive sound to investigators, she had had no way, as a civilian, of knowing that an NYPD bullet-proof vest is secured by Velcro, prosecutors said.

She remembered in graphic detail being immobilized in her bed — too drunk to resist — as she was allegedly raped, she told jurors.

And she described flashlight beams and multiple hands searching the bedding around her body before the two officers' frantic departure — "frisking the bed" for incriminating evidence, the prosecution called it.

But that 2011 jury also heard, from Tacopina, about a heroic, compassionate, police officer — a 17-year NYPD veteran, a self-sacrificing 9/11 first responder, and a literal childhood altar boy — who was just trying to help a troubled woman on that December 2008 night when he and his partner made three return trips, back and forth, to her vomit-spattered apartment.

In Carroll v. Trump, Tacopina again casts his client as the hero of the defense story, in his case as a righteously angry man lashing out in the name of truth against a woman obsessed with money, with fame, and with taking him down.

"She called him a rapist," Tacopina told the jury in openings Monday.

"Of course, he exploded. Of course, he attacked her," he said of Trump, who has continued to call Carroll "sick" and "a whack job," even in his videotaped trial deposition.

"It's a big fat hoax," Trump, who is not attending the trial, said in his deposition, which, when it's played at trial, will be the only time jurors hear his voice, assuming he continues to steer clear of the courtroom.

"She's a liar," Trump said in his deposition. "And she's a sick person, in my opinion. Really sick — something wrong with her."

Jurors are also hearing, of course, from Carroll herself. She readily admits she can't remember the day, month, or even time of year she says she was attacked.

She wore a wool dress, but no coat, she told jurors. So it may have been the winter of 1995. Or it may have been the spring of 1996. Maybe, she testified, it was a Thursday, the one night the store stayed open past 6 p.m., though she can't be sure.

Still, she told jurors, she vividly remembers the pain of Trump's fingers violating her.

"As I'm sitting here today, I can still feel it," Carroll told jurors, her voice breaking as she described, out of an otherwise time-darkened past, one mind-searing, strobe-lit moment of clarity.

Carroll is back on the stand on Monday, still under cross-examination by Tacopina, who will likely continue to poke holes in her account, a story she herself concedes in her memoir is "odd."

Why didn't she use the word "rape" when she called a girlfriend, minutes after the incident? Why didn't she seek medical attention, even to check for sexually-transmitted diseases?

How did she push a much larger Trump away from her in the dressing room — managing, as she described it, to raise her right leg high enough to knee him in the hip while balancing on her left leg, and all the while wearing four-inch heels?

Could she have managed this balancing act, as she described it to jurors, with her pulled-down tights around her thighs, and without losing hold, in her right hand, of a black leather Coach handbag with "stand up handles?"

It will be up to Carroll's own legal team, led by attorney Roberta Kaplan, to convince jurors in the coming days that it's the very imperfections in Carroll's story that best prove the truth of it.

Wouldn't someone concocting an imaginary rape, as Tacopina and Trump describe her, come up with a story that was far less odd? One without four-inch heels and a never-abandoned handbag?

So far, Carroll's explanations are landing well.

"I can dance backwards and forwards in four-inch heels," she told Tacopina when he questioned her dressing-room balancing act. "I can raise one leg in heels."

As for her story's many other oddities, Carroll is convincingly chalking these up to her own bad choices, to adrenaline and denial, and to a lifetime's stubborn, ingrained inclination to sally forth, always cheerfully, until, she says, her silence was swept away in that wave of women's voices.

"It caused me to realize that staying silent does not work," she told Tacopina of the courage she saw in that #MeToo wave.

"It doesn't work," she told him. "If women speak up, we have a chance of limiting the harm to others."