POTUS 45 Donald Trump has sued kooky columnist E. Jean Carroll for defamation because she accused him of raping her after a jury found that he didn’t.
The latest legal contretemps between the pair comes after the civil trial pursuant to Carroll’s 30-year-late lawsuit that accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in the fitting room of a department store in New York.
Carroll, the lawsuit argues, defamed Trump when she appeared on CNN after the jury found against Trump. Trump denied the charge or even knowing the daffy scribe.
The Lawsuit
The trouble for Carroll was her uttering four words … twice.
Sitting with her attorney and hate-Trump CNN’s This Morning hostess Poppy Harlow, Carroll said that Trump raped her.
When Harlow asked Carroll what she thought when the jury said she didn’t prove Trump raped her, she replied this way:
Well, I just immediately (said) in my own head, “Oh, yes, he did. Oh yes, he did.”
That isn’t, again, what the jury decided. Thus, Trump’s lawsuit.
The jury did find Trump guilty of sexual assault, and then defamation because he called her claim a “complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” The jury awarded her $5 million. Trump appealed. Carroll sued Trump under the aegis of New York’s law that gives a victim a one-time shot to file civil claims, the statute of limitations of a crime regardless.
The lawsuit is part of a long legal battle between the eccentric advice columnist and the real estate tycoon and former president.
Carroll’s $10 million defamation lawsuit against Trump, filed in 2019, heads to trial next year.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit?
Strangely, when Carroll surfaced with the tale, she didn’t call what she claims occurred at the ritzy Bergdorf Goodman store a rape. Instead, she said, it was a “fight” because so many women suffer sexual violence. And it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.”
Second, her account of the interaction with Trump, whom she claims asked her to help him select a gift before attacking her, does not sound like the prelude to a rape. It sounds like serious flirting, in which she was a willing participant, that might have led to something else. She described it in a piece for The Cut:
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. [Trump] snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” [Trump] says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
And again, what happened next wasn’t rape, or so she said. It was, again, “a fight.”
Carroll also spun the yarn in her book What Do We Need Men For: A Modest Proposal, which doesn‘t at all suggest that she might hold a dim view of the opposite sex. When she pitched the screed to the lowing herd that watches Anderson Cooper and said “most people think of rape as being sexy,” conservative writer J. Bradford Williams noted that the story sounded awfully similar to an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Indeed, at trial, Trump’s attorney asked about the similarity, as the New York Post reported:
A brief moment of the episode — titled “Theatre and Tricks” — involves a character talking about role-playing a rape fantasy in Bergdorf Goodman.
“Role-play took place in the dressing room of Bergdorf’s. While she was trying on lingerie I would burst in,” the character says.
But that was just a wild coincidence, Carroll testified.
Those disposed to believe the pro-abortion scribe’s accusation of sexual assault, lodged 30 years after it supposedly occurred, can do with that what they will.
