First of all: content warning if you click the link.
On Friday,
New York Magazine posted an article by long time advice columnist E. Jean Carroll titled "Hideous Men." on The Cut. It's going to be in the magazine when it is released tomorrow. In it she alleges sexual wrongdoing by a number of powerful men like the former chairman of CBS, Les Moonves. But the one getting the most attention is an incident she describes as happening in the mid 90s, where Donald Trump raped her in a department store. She told two friends about it at the time, both of whom are apparently fairly prominent in the New York media. NYM contacted those two women who confirmed that she told them about the incident in the 90s. One of them said they had to go to the police, the other said that Trump has so many lawyers that he would bury her and destroy her career. They also confirm those reactions.
This marks I believe the 16th woman to allege various levels of sexual assault against the president. This one, if you read it, is clearly just rape.
Two things about this:
1) Obviously, it's the president being accused of rape. That's a big fucking deal.
2) The media reaction to this story has been... I dunno, muted? I know there's a lot going on this weekend with the potential war with Iran, the crimes against humanity on the border, etc. etc. But it was very briefly on CNN's front page. The LA Times used a wire report about it. The NYT wrote it in the Books section instead of in the news parts. For the first 10 hours the only mention you could find on the Washington Post's website about it was an opinion piece decrying how male editors wouldn't give a shit. But somewhere a report on it existed, because it was the most read story on the website when I looked on Friday night. None of the TV networks led with it or even covered it on Friday, I think.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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I believe her, as everyone should, and not just because of the "Grab Em" report.
Any other president would be sunk by this, and the fact that it was barely even reported on should be concerning.
Well, that was on the money, at least.
More to the point he claimed he had never met E Jean. Carroll. There's a photo of the two of them together at some function in the article.
I did appreciate that the response to his claim he never met her was followed in a lot of reports and tweets with a picture of Trump and wife (Ivana) talking to the victim and her husband.
Basically "You're clearly lying" in picture form.
I'm figuring the same. A low chance after all the previous instances became a no chance after the Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford resolution.
If it doesn't get reported to authorities immediately, along with video of the attack, then it never happened, apparently.
Makes me so fucking angry.
Could DNA evidence survive that long?
Statute of limitations is up anyway. When New York extended it they didn't make it retroactive.
Rachael Denhollander is the woman who became the public face of the Larry Nassar survivors. Here she's rephrasing her thesis from her victim impact statement "how much is a little girl worth?" She's also calling out her fellow evangelical Christians in this post.
Her answer to that question, by the way: everything.
I don't think that applies to the court of public opinion. Not sure how you'd get the testing done, though.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/e-jean-carroll-donald-trump-new-york-magazine-1.5185627
It won't mean anything because you can't gather physical evidence on an alledged rape that was claimed to occur decades ago.
I disagree with the last sentence. While it is brave to speak out, keeping silent in the face of all the repercussions she was likely to suffer (that she went and listed), is not the opposite of brave.
She is no coward for not coming forward then. Anita Hill happened not long before. Clinton's scandal happened not long after. Being concerned of the consequences that would rain down on you is not cowardly.
It won't mean anything because the whole country - the whole world - has just accepted he's a rapist. His supporters don't credibly refute it - they simply don't think it's disqualifying.
I had a guy tell me a few weeks ago that Trump won because people were sick of the "double standards that let democrats get away with sexual misconduct while republicans get punished for it." I wasn't keen on dissecting the complex cognitive leaps going on there, but I'm sure that for quite a lot of people, the sexual violence of the Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.
Obviously Trump will claim they had consensual sex, but if he denied even knowing her that’s a wild shift in his story.
She's being self-deprecatingly sarcastic.
The only "truth" Trump cares about is the current one. We've seen it over and over again. The problem is, whether you support, oppose, or are currently indifferent to him, being caught in a lie isn't going to change how the vast majority see him.
Sadly, it's become accepted that the current President is a known compulsive liar, and have it "baked in" to their assessment of him. While I hope not everything he does is normalized, lies definitely seem to be.
The best case scenario is that people by and large believe Carroll's story and it becomes part of common knowledge, in the same way that everyone knows that Trump as an adulterer and a liar and a racist. And just as 40% of the country doesn't care that Trump is a lying racist adulterous misogynist, they also won't care that he's a rapist.
It's still important to get this story out there, and we should absolutely be talking about it, but nothing is really going to change.
The dismissal of "locker room talk" by his supporters really reinforces how rape culture is just culture to them.
Also how Hilary's claim of half of Trump’s supporters as being deplorable was sadly, a significant underestimation.
Some will just deny reality instead of accepting it but not caring. Like my brother who denies that Trump is a nepotist, despite Trump hiring both his daughter and son-in-law. (Those were not a fun series of conversations.)
Which is that she had so many instances of rape, assault or harassment perpetrated towards her, that this is a systemic thing, and that it's not just one bad man, but an entire culture that allows for this behaviour to go so unpunished and unacknowledged one of them could become President
Obviously the Trump part is the most relevant to everyone in a political sense, but she is also trying to show that there's a common denominator in that behaviour, in that men keep getting away with this shit
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Basically, of a survey of people who have stated categorically that they would be voting for Trump in 2020, 7% think that the accusations against Trump are Definitely True. Another 12% think they are Probably True. A further 25% thing they are Maybe True. There's more information in the tweet thread.
These people are monsters. How the EVERLIVING FUCK could you say "Yup, he absolutely/probably raped someone, but I'll be voting for him anyways.", and live with yourself afterwards?
I just... what the fuck. I'd root for Asteroid 2020, but these people are such cockroaches they'd probably survive.
There's also a lot of Bill Clinton/Ted Kennedy/etc so fuck you.
I mean... if it came out in 2020 that the Democratic candidate for POTUS was a rapist, how would you vote?
There are people who genuinely believe - wrongly - that liberals want to destroy the country, so Trump's having raped a woman or ten is still the lesser evil.
Doesn't make it any less gross, but let's not reduce our ideological opponents to caricatures.
They are exactly those people. See literally any interview with any Republican about the crimes against humanity on the border or a black kid killed by police.
And we would not vote for that person.
Rape is in fact an important part of the moral code enforcement for them. They usually would not rape themselves, most men don't and wouldn't (woman are raped in large numbers becaude rapists tend to rape many different women throughout their lives) but they are very happy that there are rapists out there because otherwise women would be too comfortable with their own sexuality.
I'd be very interested in seeing what the MoE was for that survey.
Sample size was about a thousand. So for the Trump voter subset probably n = 400-500, which if you throw in a margin of error calculator, you get 4%.
Very funny. I'm thinking more of people who honestly believe Democrats/socialist policies will bring economic ruin, because those are the lies they've been taught.
Look, I'm just as frustrated with misinformed/idiot/bigoted conservative voters as the rest of you; but the insistence on these forums that they're all mustache-twirling evil xenophobes is tiresome. I felt the same way listening to crazy people in church ranting that liberals wanted to outlaw religion, kill grandma, and force your kids to be gay.
edit: to put it another way: there are plenty of actual reasons to be angry at these people without needing to invent new ones.