Via the NYT: Trump Loses Appeal of Carroll’s $5 Million Award in Sex-Abuse Case.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday failed to overturn a $5 million judgment that he sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.
[…]
The appeals court rejected Mr. Trump’s request for a new trial in the case, which produced the smaller of two defamation judgments against him. “Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said. It was unsigned but issued by a three-judge panel made up of Denny Chin and Susan Carney — appointed by President Barack Obama — as well as Myrna Perez, appointed by President Biden.
This is at least three loses in court on this issue and an ongoing affirmation that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll and that he was serious when he said the following.
Trump: “Yeah that’s her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Bush: “Whatever you want.”
Trump: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
But, no doubt, his defenders will either just dismiss it all as fake or parse what it should be called instead of reckoning with the kind of man that they have helped put back into power.
Never mind he, himself, described the way he behaves. Never mind his clear record of womanizing. Never mind the multiple times he has now been found liable for this behavior in court.
Never mind the following.
The jury of six men and three women found that Mr. Trump had sexually abused Ms. Carroll but did not find that he raped her. It was unclear why jurors chose the lesser offense of abuse over rape, which is defined under state law as sexual intercourse without consent that involves any penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening.
The federal jury also found that Mr. Trump defamed Ms. Carroll when he wrote on Truth Social in 2022 that her case was “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” The jury ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.
This year, another Manhattan jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of rape, and continuing to do so in social media posts at news conferences and even during the trial. Ms. Carroll’s lawyers argued that a large award was necessary to stop Mr. Trump from continuing to deride her.
On the issue of the word “rape” I would note the following via WaPo: Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll.
“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,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
The former requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape. He cited definitions offered by the American Psychological Association and the Justice Department, which in 2012 expanded its definition of rape to include penetration “with any body part or object.”
This was, of course, part of the discourse of the ABC News/Disney settlement over the usage of the word in question. But let me underscore that it should be disturbing that many people would prefer to have a side conversation about rape v. sexual assault via unwanted, forced digital penetration as if it somehow exonerates their preferred candidate.
If one is going to defend Trump or critique the precision of the discourse, please be mindful of what one is defending.
I would prefer to have major political parties that did not nominate persons of such low character for any office in the land, let alone for the most powerful office on Earth.
And yet, here we are.
Of course, the Trump camp’s response falls into the dismissal of it all.
Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s chief campaign spokesman, who is set to be his White House communications director, said Mr. Trump was re-elected with an “overwhelming mandate,” and he said the American people “demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll hoax, which will continue to be appealed.”
First, I am already tired of talk of “mandates.” While I fully understand why the winning party makes the assertion, the bottom line is that the concept itself is bogus as a general matter. Moreover, barely winning a plurality of the popular vote and having a razor-thin margin in the House does not even a rhetorical “mandate” make.
Second, and far more importantly, Trump could have won 60%-40% with an EC wipeout and it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the Carroll case.
