The E. Jean Carroll versus Trump rape/defamation case
I haven’t followed the E. Jean Carroll versus Trump trial at all closely. You may not have followed it much, either. But plenty of people are following it with great interest, most of them hoping it will be one of many things to sink Trump and that GOP voters will nominate him despite it. The trial is taking place in New York – of course – and therefore it may be that the jury would convict him no matter how weak the case.
And it seems plenty weak. The plaintiff, Jean Carroll, alleged in a 2019 book that Trump raped her in Bergdorf Goodman some time in the mid-90s He denied it and insulted her as not being his “type”, and she’s suing him for defamation. Therefore it is a civil rather than criminal trial.
In addition, New York obliged her by passing a very special law enabling this trial:
The trial [which began] Tuesday stems from a second lawsuit filed in November 2022, alleging defamation and battery under New York State’s new Adult Survivors Act. The legislation opened a one-year window in which people who say they were the survivors of sexual abuse as adults could sue even if the state’s statute of limitations would otherwise bar their claims.
The law was signed by Hochul in May of 2022 and allowed people to begin filing six months from the date, with no limits on how old their cases might be. There is little doubt in my mind that one strong motive for its passing was to enable the suit by Carroll against Trump.
The statute of limitations aims to protect people from vague and ancient claims that are more difficult to defend against, in which details are forgotten and witnesses and records may have died and/or been lost. But hey, who cares about that, when there’s an opportunity to get Trump?
Here’s a little sample of the testimony in the current trial:
In one line of questioning, [Trump’s attorney] Tacopina sought to highlight an opposition to Trump by Carroll and her friends, as well as suggest they came together to make a plan.
“As soon as we are both well enough to scheme, we must do our patriotic duty again,” Carroll’s friend Carol Martin emailed her on September 23, 2017, one piece of evidence showed.
“TOTALLY!!!” Carroll responded in an email. “I have something special for you when we meet.”
Carroll testified she didn’t know what she meant in the more than five-year-old email by the words “something special.”
“This is an email … that I have no recollection of. I suspect it’s something funny. I can’t imagine what it is. I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t recall anything about this email.”
Of course not.
But I can certainly imagine what that special something might have been.
The case also is one of a newly-popular type of case in which an accused person saying that his/her accuser is lying about a crime is considered grounds for a defamation suit by the accuser. I find that unconscionable, no matter whom the defendant might be.
Carroll’s attorney used BOBS [“bring out the bad stuff”] masterfully during her testimony…She explained that:
She was flirting with Donald Trump prior to the sexual assault.
The door to the dressing room was open while she was assaulted, but she was trapped by Trump, who weighed at least “100 pounds more” than her.
She did not scream during the attack—saying Wednesday, “I’m a fighter, not a screamer.”
She did not write down anything about the attack in her diary. She added that she never puts negative things into her diary.
She did not file a police report (saying that she was convinced by Carol Martin that she would be “destroyed” by Trump if she did).
She could not recall the precise date, week, month, or year of the attack (although she claimed it likely occurred in late 1995 or early 1996).
She is a registered Democrat.
Her book that described the attack had virtually no sales.
And yet – as with Kavanaugh’s accuser – plenty of people will believe this woman, and she’s got other (no doubt Trump-hating) friends who will testify that she told them of the rape at the time despite never going to authorities. Trump’s attorney’s cross-examination of her probably only increased the perception of her as a beleaguered, unfairly criticized, victim – who is being victimized again by this trial that she has so nobly and bravely brought. The defense attorney is in a double-bind in which, if he questions Carroll’s veracity, he’s just an abuser like Trump! And if he doesn’t question her veracity and sincerity, then the jury may indeed believe her.
Trump predictably – and in my opinion stupidly – has recently made things worse by various postings on social media that are critical of the trial and the plaintiff. Eric Trump also made some social media statements that the judge said were violations of the laws against influencing a jury. Is Trump his own worst enemy? No – but only because he’s got so many rabid and powerful and ruthless other enemies.
ADDENDUM: Carroll claims that quite a few people raped her.
She published an account that defamed Trump, without evidence, and this suit is about his allegedly defaming her by denying it. It’s insane, but it’s New York.
lets put an end to this clown show
https://www.revolver.news/2023/04/trial-updates-apparently-everybody-in-new-york-raped-e-jean-carroll-scheme-email-she-called-black-husband-ape/
The case is very weak indeed, the judge would seem to be a partisan hack, and it is almost certain that the biased jury in NYC will be sympathetic to this delusional woman, clearly a fantasist. Next will come, in all likelihood, indictments in Georgia and then in the District of Corruption, the goal of this lawfare being that next year will have one Trumpian trial after another, trial-stacking to accompany charge-stacking. Our Anglo-American legal system, once the envy of the world, has been completely subverted, like our educational system and nearly everything else in our moribund republic.
This case is a great illustration of why we have statutes of limitation in the first place. Caroll can’t remember the date when the purported assault occured, which deinies Trump the opportunity to present an alibi. Justice isn’t really served for either party. Caroll lacks the ability to produce evidence that could truly prove her case, because the only evidence left is from 30+ year old memories. Trump is denied a meaningful opportunity to defend himself at least because he has no opportunity to present an alibi and he has to try to rebut stale evidence.
The NY law to waive the SOL stinks to high heaven.
Also, how is Caroll going to claim defamation damages with a straight face? Does anyone believe that she interacts with anyone who would consider her reputation harmed because Trump called her a liar? I suspect the opposite is true.
I call it the daily basilisk because there is no level they won’t stoop to, while obscuring real criminality like the scranton clan of grifters
there apparently is a sympathetic juror, (well he listens to tim pool) but this is another perversion of the law,
Doesn’t the principle of “ex post facto” apply to Hochul’s action in May, 2022? I thought the Constitution prohibited prosecution under a law that did not exist at the time of the alleged offense?
They really, really do not like this Trump guy.
j e @ 4:41pm,
Well stated and, unfortunately, all too true.
I blame the Baby Boomers. 🙂
The defamation that Carroll alleges was not beyond the limit to bring suit, was it? Regardless of whether the alleged rape itself would have been, the “defamation” was quite recent.
As for the rape with no date or contemporaneous corroboration, it’s just the old Roy Moore playbook they also ran on Kavanaugh. You may also have read that Roy Moore was the dry run for alleging “Russian interference” where none existed.
Note all the corporate and government actors. We’ve been in a banana republic for some time. The government itself is interfering in elections.
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says…
The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.
The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with Mr. Morgan.
All Trump can really do is mock this trial, and the people conducting it. To roll over without complaint is unacceptable. I admire that he is willing to take this bullet of controversy.
And those who think the GOP can avoid these sorts of problems by dumping Trump and nominating someone else in 2024 are delusional. If it ever appears that DeSantis is going to be the nominee, he will be indicted somewhere for something, or have women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.
Leftist Lawfare is the game, they keep throwing these cases at DJT and eventually one will stick having a jury that iare picked raving Marxists
yes, that guy
https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1652040899910574094?cxt=HHwWnICxmcKcne0tAAAA
a look at the zysgy from another angle,
The approach of questioning Carroll to get it on the record that she cannot recall details of many interactions, actions, and communications is a good one. Suspect that the Trump hating NY jury and judge will ignore it and its significance to the complaint, but will be useful in the appeal.
@yancey ward:women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.
Or men. The Good Fight already had an episode where a man accused DeSantis of raping him.
of course they made the accuser a trump supporter,
meanwhile hunter could probably kill one of the hookers on his video, and the press would cover it up, as with the rest of the vc andrews characters in the scranton clan,
If it ever appears that DeSantis is going to be the nominee, he will be indicted somewhere for something, or have women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.
==
Memo to Bauxite: not one partisan Democrat on our Fakebook feed ever admitted that Christine Blasey Ford was not credible or that James Roche was a pompous clown.
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When you have to fight back against the media, the Congress, the Intel Agencies, and the left wing…what do you expect him to do?? Lie down and take it?? They have lied about this man for 0ver 7 years, and NOBODY is paying for their lies. This country is going down the toilet, yet everybody is so mad because Trump fights back.
Yancey Ward on April 29, 2023 at 12:05 am said:
And those who think the GOP can avoid these sorts of problems by dumping Trump and nominating someone else in 2024 are delusional. If it ever appears that DeSantis is going to be the nominee, he will be indicted somewhere for something, or have women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.
THIS^^^^
It seems to me Trump could defend against this rape charge by saying he was out of the country on the date Carroll claimed it took place. And when the judge asks him to specify that date, Trump’s defense should just say “make her go first. When she tells us what date it took place, we’ll tell you when Trump was out of the country.”
Alice in Wonderland stuff.
well this is criminal malfeasance and any judge with any degree of integrity would have bounced this case,
Also, Lisa Birnbach was apparently in on the “scheme.”
“This has to stop,” Birnbach suggested in a Sept. 23, 2017 email about Trump. “As soon as we’re both well enough to scheme, we must do our patriotic duty again.”
“TOTALLY!!! I have something special for you when we meet,” Carroll responded.
If you had suspicions about The Preppy Handbook, you might have been right.
“If it ever appears that DeSantis is going to be the nominee, he will be indicted somewhere for something, or have women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.”
This is one reason I think DeSantis should wait until 2028. Should the Democrats cheat massively again (and I am sure they will, and will likely win again), DeSantis will be a spent round anyway.
Let Trump take this fight, if for no other reason than he generates more voter enthusiasm than DeSantis.
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