Still Liable

Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign and the limited political impact of Trump's legal problems.

Lola Fadulu at NYT:

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.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued to a federal appeals panel that a lower court in Manhattan had erred by allowing two women to testify in the Carroll trial that he had also sexually assaulted them. The lawyers also argued that the court should not have allowed Ms. Carroll’s lawyers to play the recording of the “Access Hollywood” conversation in which Mr. Trump bragged in vulgar terms about grabbing women by the genitals.

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 Pérez, appointed by President Biden.

“Both E. Jean Carroll and I are gratified by today’s decision,” Roberta Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, said in a statement. “We thank the Second Circuit for its careful consideration of the parties’ arguments.”

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60504/gov.uscourts.ca2.60504.176.1.pdf

 CARROLL v. TRUMP (2023) United States District Court, S.D. New York. E. Jean CARROLL, Plaintiff, v. Donald J. TRUMP, Defendant. 22-cv-10016 (LAK) Decided: July 19, 2023

The jury's unanimous verdict in Carroll II was almost entirely in favor of Ms. Carroll. The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had “raped” her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law – a section that provides that the label “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions in New York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials is not called “rape” under the New York Penal Law. It instead is labeled “sexual abuse.”1

As is shown in the following notes, the definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of “rape” in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries,2 in some federal and state criminal statutes,3 and elsewhere.4 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.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.

So why does this matter? It matters because Mr. Trump now contends that the jury's $2 million compensatory damages award for Ms. Carroll's sexual assault claim was excessive because the jury concluded that he had not “raped” Ms. Carroll.5 Its verdict, he says, could have been based upon no more than “groping of [Ms. Carroll's] breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape.”6 And while Mr. Trump is right that a $2 million award for such groping alone could well be regarded as excessive, that undermines rather than supports his argument. His argument is entirely unpersuasive.

The Senate Rejected John Tower for a Lot Less

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book is about the 2024 election. The consequences of that election are coming into view. Trump is nominating Fox pundit Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Jane Mayer at The New Yorker:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Judd Legum:

Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape

While he was a student at Princeton in 2002, Hegseth was the publisher of the Princeton Tory, a right-wing student newspaper. In the September 2002 edition of the publication, flagged for Popular Information by Will Davis of Arc Initiatives, Hegseth published a column that claimed having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape. The columnist claimed that rape required both the failure to consent and "duress," and women who are passed out cannot experience "duress":

[A] bemusing yet mandatory orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual intercourse constituted “rape.” The actual instance portrayed in the skit was in fact not a clear case of rape – at least not in my home state. (In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape.) Yet the panel – all females in the session I attended – claimed that rape it was.

In an introductory note to students in the September edition, Hegseth wrote that he hoped the Princeton Tory would "help shape the way you view the world." 

 

Trump and Epstein

In Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics, we look at Trump's dishonesty and disregard for the rule of law.

 Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign and the impact of Trump's legal problems. New York courts have found that he is a rapist and a fraud.

 Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.

The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time.

...

On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”

On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.

He alleged that he and Trump would pick up women by combining to split them from their male companions. “We always used to go to Atlantic City to try to find girls in the casino,” he said. “And if there was a guy, I would say, ‘I’m here to invite the guy to go out to dinner.’ And he’d say, [to the woman], ‘Let me show you the casino.’ And as he walked out, he put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, and the bodyguard would walk up and Donald, whoosh, take the girl away.”

Epstein also alleged that Trump had an elaborate scheme to procure sex with his friends’ wives. He would call the men into his Trump Tower office to ask them about their sex lives and offer them sex with beauty pageant contestants, the pedophile said. He would do this while the wives were—unknown to their husbands—listening on speakerphone, so that he could then seduce the wives on the basis their husbands had betrayed them, Epstein claimed.

A Bad Day for Trump

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  Dick and Liz Cheney are supporting Harris.

Adam Wren and Megan Messerly at Politico:

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney made clear her war against former President Donald Trump won’t be limited to her endorsement of Kamala Harris and will include campaigning in battleground states this fall.

In an interview Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Cheney also said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would be voting for Harris. The audience erupted in cheers after she mentioned her father’s vote.

When you are running behind in a presidential race, it is not a best practice to remind people that a jury found you liable for sexual abuse.  AP:

Veering from the campaign trail to a courtroom, Donald Trump quietly observed Friday as his lawyer fought to overturn a verdict finding the former president liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

The Republican nominee and his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, a writer, sat at tables about 15 feet (4.5 meters) apart, in a Manhattan federal appeals court. Trump didn’t acknowledge or look at Carroll as he passed directly in front of her on the way in and out, but he sometimes shook his head, including when Carroll’s attorney said he sexually attacked her.

Trump attorney D. John Sauer told three 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges that the civil trial in Carroll’s lawsuit was muddied by improper evidence.

“This case is a textbook example of implausible allegations being propped up by highly inflammatory, inadmissible” evidence, Sauer said, noting that jurors saw the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted in 2005 about grabbing women’s genitals because when someone is a star, “you can do anything.”
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Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, told judges the evidence in question was proper, and that there was plenty of proof in the nearly two-week-long trial of Carroll’s claim that Trump attacked her in a luxury department store dressing room decades ago. She said the “Access Hollywood” tape, as the trial judge had noted, could be viewed as a confession.

“E. Jean Carroll brought this case because Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in 1996, in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, and then defamed her in 2022 by claiming that she was crazy and made the whole thing up,” Kaplan said.

Carroll, standing with Kaplan outside the courthouse afterward, declined to comment.

Trump left court in a motorcade, then delivered a lengthy diatribe against the case at Trump Tower, where he said again that Carroll — and other women who had accused him of sexual assault — were making everything up.

“It’s so false. It’s a made up, fabricated story by somebody, I think, initially, just looking to promote a book,” Trump said. Carroll first spoke publicly about her encounter with Trump in a newly published memoir in 2019.

In remarks to reporters Friday, Trump repeated many claims about Carroll that a jury has already deemed defamatory, and added some new ones, like suggesting that a photograph of him and Carroll together in 1987 was produced by artificial intelligence. It was unclear whether his comments could lead to a new defamation lawsuit by Carroll.

“I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: all options are on the table,” Kaplan said after Trump’s news conference.

Abuse of Power Saturday

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.  Trump is exploiting presidential power in unprecedented ways.

Stephen Collinson at CNN:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday went further than ever before in putting the degradation of the rule of law at the center of his reelection campaign.

Trump called on his supporters in North Carolina to act as poll watchers, to watch out for "thieving, and stealing and robbing" that he is warning without evidence will taint Election Day. He made his call at a packed rally in Winston-Salem where he and many of his fans made a mockery of the state's mask mandate -- as well as the advice of his own government amid a pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans and was exacerbated by his prioritizing politics over science.

But most shockingly, and in one of the most stunning maneuvers in the modern history of the Department of Justice, government lawyers Tuesday applied to take over the defense of Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by a woman who accused him of rape in the 1990s.

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein at Politico:

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lies to the FBI are so clear — and their effect on the FBI’s Russia probe so obvious — that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case can only be a pretext to help an ally of President Donald Trump, a court-appointed adviser to Judge Emmet Sullivan argued Friday.

In an unsparing, 30-page brief, John Gleeson, tapped by Sullivan to argue against the dismissal of the case, suggests that the Justice Department’s arguments for letting Flynn off the hook conflict with its positions in other cases — and even in earlier rounds of the Flynn case itself — and therefore can only be chalked up to Trump’s pressure campaign.

“There is clear evidence that this motion reflects a corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system,” wrote Gleeson, a former federal judge in Manhattan who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Ryan J. Reilly at Huffington Post:

An elected prosecutor who took a role in Donald Trump’s presidential commission on law enforcement has resigned, telling Attorney General William Barr that he is concerned the commission was “intent on providing cover for a predetermined agenda that ignores the lessons of the past” and will issue a final report that “will only widen the divisions in our nation.”

Trump formed the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice late last October, announcing its formation at the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual meeting. Trump’s order mandated that the commission issue a report within one year ― a deadline that falls just days ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The commission is stacked with members of law enforcement, and the American Civil Liberties Union has questioned whether it is a “sham commission formed only for the purposes of advancing a ‘Thin Blue Line’ law and order agenda.”

John Choi, the elected prosecutor in Ramsey County, Minnesota, served as a member of the commission’s criminal justice system personnel intersection working group. But Choi, whose county includes the city of St. Paul, wrote in a letter to Barr that he was quitting his role on one of the commission’s 17 working groups because he worries the final report “will vilify local prosecutors who exercise their well settled prosecutorial discretion consistent with their community’s values and the interests of justice.”

Morgan Chalfant at The Hill:

President Trump said Thursday that he would “very quickly” stifle riots on election night if Democrats organize protests against his potential victory, suggesting he would do so by employing a law allowing him to deploy active-duty troops domestically.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that, we have the power to do that if we want,” Trump told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro when asked how he would stop potential riots on election night should he win.

“Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes,” Trump continued.

Trump appeared to be referring to the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the commander in chief to deploy U.S. troops domestically to enforce federal or state laws under certain circumstances. The law has been used in rare and extreme cases in U.S. history, and Trump endured backlash when he suggested he could use the provision earlier this year to quell protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

Dan Diamond at Politico:

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Trump and Rape

Attorney Lisa Bloom writes at The Huffington Post:

An anonymous “Jane Doe” filed a federal lawsuit against GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump last week, accusing him of raping her in 1994 when she was thirteen years old. The mainstream media ignored the filing.

...

Two prior women have accused Mr. Trump, in court documents, of actual or attempted sexual assault. (Mr. Trump denies all the allegations.)

Under oath, Ivana Trump accused Mr. Trump of a violent rape.
...

A few years later, after their divorce was settled, Ms. Trump claimed that she did not mean the word “rape” in a “literal or criminal” sense.

Note: virtually every settlement of a case involving a high profile person paying money to a former spouse - or anyone - requires the person receiving the money to agree in writing to ironclad nondisparagement and confidentiality. In plain English: you promise to be quiet and not say anything bad about the party paying you money. This has been the case in hundreds of settlement agreements I have worked on over the years. Ms. Trump was almost certainly contractually prohibited after she signed from saying anything negative about Mr. Trump. And it is also common to attempt to “cure” prior negative statements with new agreed-to language - like, I didn’t mean it literally. (You didn’t mean forcible penetration literally?)

A business acquaintance accused Mr. Trump of sexual harassment and “attempted rape”.

A second woman accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, in 1997. According toThe Guardian, then thirty-four year old Jill Harth alleged in a federal lawsuit that Trump violated her “physical and mental integrity” when he touched her intimately without consent after her husband went into business with him, leaving her “emotionally devastated [and] distraught.” The lawsuit called the multiple acts “attempted rape.” Shortly thereafter she voluntarily withdrew the case when a parallel suit against Mr. Trump brought by her husband was settled. When The Guardian reached the woman in 2016 to ask whether she stood by her sexual assault allegations, she responded, “yes.”

Trump, Harassment, and Rape

Andrew Kaczynski reports at Buzzfeed:

Donald Trump, who repeatedly advocated for Mike Tyson during the boxer’s 1992 rape trial in Indiana, said on Monday that he knows nothing about it.

“Do you still think Mike Tyson got a raw deal when he endorsed you?” Trump was asked.

“I don’t know anything about it. I know he endorsed me. I heard he endorsed me,” Trump stated. “I don’t know anything about his trial. I really don’t.”

Trump, a longtime friend of Tyson, opined at length about the trial on television, in newspapers, and in magazines.

Alana Horowitz Satlin writes at The Huffington Post:

Donald Trump continued his apparent push to alienate all women voters by comparing the U.S.’s relationship with China to rape.

“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he said at a rally Sunday. “It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

The “rape” he was referring was the trade deficit between the two countries, not an actual act of sexual assault. Advocates against sexual violence sharply criticized the Republican presidential front-runner’s comments.
...
“Using the word ‘rape’ to describe anything other than sexual violence trivializes the experience of survivors,” added Colleen Daly, a spokeswoman for the group End Rape on Campus. “The statement perpetuates our cultural indifference to rape and desensitizes us to all forms of sexual violence.”
...
Trump has spoken flippantly about rape before. After past allegations that Trump assaulted ex-wife Ivana resurfaced last year, his lawyer claimed that “you cannot rape your spouse.” In reality, over half of all women who report being raped identify their partner as the attacker, data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows. 

Mark Hensch reports at The Hill:

A Democrat in Arkansas’s Senate race on Monday released a campaign ad documenting some of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s comments about women. 

 “Donald Trump has repeatedly spouted offensive comments denigrating women,” Conner Eldridge said in a statement. "This has to be called out for what it is: serial harassment.

 “I’ve prosecuted domestic violence and cases in which criminals have harassed and abused women in horrible ways, including verbally,” continued Eldridge, a former U.S. attorney. “A senator should strongly condemn these comments. Instead, Sen. [John] Boozman [R-Ark.] is an enabler of Donald Trump’s reprehensible behavior.