Politics - News Analysis

As the Election Approaches Make No Mistake: Donald Trump Raped E. Jean Carroll

Just in case you weren't clear on it before.

We’ve written a number of times about the fact that Trump fans and political backers will do and say anything to make his inexcusable behavior look better.

And it’s not hard to understand why they do it: Nobody wants to vote for a semi-literate, misogynistic, criminal, racist buffoon, let alone admit they work for one. And nobody likes to find out they got suckered by someone after the fact.

They’ve come out and said he didn’t say things he’s on video saying. They’ve said we took things he admitted to out of context. When he does something bad, they point at something bad another person did (or didn’t do) and play the game of whataboutism.

But their many, many examples of this behavior all pale in comparison with one example.

After Trump was ordered to pay his victim E. Jean Carroll more than $80 million dollars for defamation, his legal team went straight for an appeal. That’s to be expected; even someone who’s NOT a philandering, handsy piece of garbage like Trump would try to defend their own honor.

But the defamation trial followed an initial one in which the jury had to find more than they had to find in the most recent one. In the $80 million trial, they just had to prove he’d continued to lie about the same things he’d lied about before.

But in the first trial, they actually had to find that he was guilty of what he’d been accused of, which was “forcible digital penetration.”

And that’s exactly what the jury found. But Trump’s legal team decided that because the original charge didn’t specifically say “rape,” but rather “sexual abuse,” the punishment handed down was excessive. And that’s not in the second, $80 million case, that’s in the first one, where he was “only” found liable for $5 million.

They literally said that because the victim had characterized it as rape, but the jury had found him liable under the actual legal term, Trump wasn’t actually defaming her when he disputed her claims.

Writer E. Jean Carroll waves as she leaves a federal court in Manhattan on January 26, 2024, after the verdict in her defamation case against disgraced former president Donald Trump. He was ordered by a jury to pay an additional $83 million in damages to Carroll, whom he publicly insulted and called a liar for alleging that he sexually assaulted her.

Outside the courtroom, Trump’s lawyer ranted that “This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings.”

Judge Lewis Kaplan shut that argument down pretty quickly.

He was, in fact, pretty obviously miffed at their entire argument. Trump’s lawyers took what he WAS found liable for, distilled it down to the minimum offense that COULD have been defined the same way (groping her breasts), and tried to argue for a new trial.

Kaplan wasn’t having 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’,” he said in his filing.

This is also an issue with New York’s penal law, and hopefully the state’s legislature will get on this. According to 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 any 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”. So, I won’t give the many examples of what we know rape is. The forcible penetration of ANYTHING into a woman (or man) is rape. But NY’s law is very succinct. Only a penis penetrating a vagina is rape. That’s the law.

Particularly galling was the part about the breast groping, because, as Kaplan pointed out, she didn’t accuse Trump of that. The only thing she accused him of that could be legally called sexual assault is what the jury found him liable for. In fact, the jury wasn’t even ASKED to specify the conduct he was guilty of.

“Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” said Kaplan.

So there you have it: Your choice this year is between Kamala Harris and a rapist, no matter how Team Trump tries to paint it. Remind your friends.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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