The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-ridiculous-news-part-five/
80-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a former relationship- and sex-advice columnist, just won a huge $83.3 million settlement from Donald Trump in connection with a previous finding that she was “defamed” by Donald Trump.
New York is not a hospitable place for any conservative politician or celebrity, much less one ex-president Donald Trump—as we have seen from prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who both promised voters that they would get Trump if just elected.
But here are some strange facts about the case—with the proviso we have no idea of what exactly happened when both Carroll and Trump consensually and strangely entered into ribald banter in a department store’s lingerie section, then mutually and apparently willfully entered a dressing room, at which point their stories radically diverge (as opposed to somewhat diverged, since Trump at various times said he didn’t recall meeting her at all).
- Trump appeared raucously in person in court to turn the civil suit into a referendum on the supposedly coordinated leftwing efforts to damage his presidential candidacy. But he was fighting with a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, and with a New York liberal jury pool, in a suit concerning his denials of a sexual assault of Carroll some 30 years ago. She won an earlier ruling that his meae culpae were excessive and entered the realm of character assassination and therefore was suing for defamation damages.Judge Kaplan certainly grew tired of Trump’s editorialization and like most New York jurists probably did not enjoy Trump in his courtroom in the first place. And although a jury earlier did not find Trump guilty of “rape,” Kaplan de facto has stated that it was OK to claim publicly that Trump was nevertheless guilty of rape.Or as the judge put it, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
But if that’s true, Judge Kaplan, why didn’t the jury, on the judge’s prior own instructions, simply convict Trump of rape, which it certainly had the power to do? How can someone not guilty of the definition of rape be guilty of rape?
- Carroll could never decide what year the “assault” took place, only sometime in the 1994,1995, or 1996 three-year time frame. That and dozens of other inconsistencies in her narrative prompted the Christine Blasey Ford sort of question of how would one remember such minute details of an alleged violent encounter but not even the year in which it took place?For well over 20 years, she did not write about the alleged attack, much less accuse Trump of sexual assault—at least until he became a controversial rightwing presidential candidate in 2015–16.
- There were no witnesses to the alleged assault, but Carroll drew her complaint from earlier material she had published in a 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For?, and has variously characterized the alleged assault not as rape but a “fight.” If one claims one is damaged in the public square from the attention fueled by outrageous denials by Donald Trump to charges that nearly 30 years ago he assaulted a woman, why would one, for the first time in three decades and during the Trump presidency, write a widely covered and publicized article accusing the then president of the United States of an alleged rape? Would not that be designed to gain publicity, and much of it given the chronological lapses, bad publicity?
- Carroll claimed she was defamed and ruined by Trump’s vehement denials of her charges of rape. But her employer at ELLE magazine denied her spat with Trump had anything to do with the decision to fire her at 76 (how many fashion/boyfriend/sex/dating columnists are still writing in their late seventies?).
To be continued…
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