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Saturday, April 27, 2024
January 26, 2024
Raheem J. Kassam
Analysis

KASSAM: The Trump-Carroll Case is Blatantly the Greatest Miscarriage of Justice in Modern American History.

The awarding of nearly $90 million to the second-rate advice columnist E. Jean Carroll will doubtless be remembered for generations as the greatest miscarriage of justice in contemporary American history. Jean Carroll’s case was not just ludicrous on the face of it, but between the judge, the “experts” who testified, and the mechanisms by which the case even came to be, it’s impossible for any ordinary person in the West to see this as anything more than the continuation of a series of hoaxes perpetrated on former President Donald J. Trump with the desire to keep him from re-entering the Oval Office in January 2025.

THE ‘RAPE’.

During the latest episode of this trial, Carroll admitted she wasn’t doing very well financially and needed to find a way to sell more books. The testimony appears to be the basis for the very first claim she ever made, in New York magazine’s The Cut, in the summer of 2019.

Far from a compelling claim, the 80-year-old writer initially laid out the story that her supposed rape occurred either in 1994, before altering the day to be “in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996.” She couldn’t remember the specifics. What she did remember was that she was wearing a “Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.” She later refused to produce said coat for DNA testing despite admitting to still owning it, describing it as “unworn and unlaundered since that evening.” It later came to light that the coatdress was not made in 1994 or 1995.

It didn’t matter to Carroll, who has accused multiple men of sexually assaulting or raping her throughout her life, including a babysitter’s boyfriend, a dentist, a camp counselor, an unnamed college date, an unnamed boss, and CBS chief executive Les Moonves.

Carroll also appeared to remember specifics such as the emptiness of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the early evening – a detail she called “inconceivable” – as well as admitting that it was her who wanted to sexually harrass Trump originally because she wanted a “funny story to tell” about getting the then-infamous New York City developer to put on women’s lingerie.

Upon voluntarily entering a dressing room which she claims would “usually [be] locked until a client wants to try something on,” she claims Trump “unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”

After apparently struggling free, she says, “I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.”

The story itself beggars belief. If a celebrity had tried to rape me in a public place, I think the first thing I might have done was tell someone. In the words of her own friends, E. Jean Carroll is an “attention-seeker.” It is already difficult to imagine such a scenario unfolding without immediate consequences for the assailant, let alone when the victim is a nationally published attention-seeker.

LAW & ORDER.

But even if your sympathies still lay with Carroll, consider this. Carroll – a self-declared Law and Order TV show fan – first made her allegations against Trump in a 2019 book, just a few years after an episode of the show saw characters discuss a role-played rape in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

 

CNN reported in 2019 that Carroll was “an avid Law & Order franchise fan,” to which Carroll – an ostensibly damaged rape victim responded of the “coincidence”: “It tickled me to death.” She called it “a great, huge coincidence, but… a magnificent one.”

‘RAPE IS SEXY’.

One of the critical pieces of evidence left-wing Judge Lewis Kaplan forbade from being shown to the jury was the now-infamous clip of Carroll on CNN with Anderson Cooper.

“The word rape carries so many sexual connotations,” she offered in a live discussion in 2019. “This was not sexual,” she added, to which Cooper replied: “I think most people think of rape as a violent assault.” Carroll’s response stunned Cooper himself.

“I think most people think of rape as being sexy… think of the fantasies,” she said before CNN hurriedly cut to a commercial break.

Carroll’s entire character is one of bizarre sexual thoughts, antics, and actions. Another piece of evidence the judge refused to allow was that Carroll named her cat “Vagina” and posted repeatedly about anal sex, celebrity fantasies, and pornography.

In fact, in 2012, Trump himself was the subject of one of these fantasies Carroll shared on her Facebook page: “Would you have sex with Donald Trump for $17,000?” before going on to suggest that in her fantasy scenario, Trump may not be able to speak. An odd thing to post for someone who alleges that the same man raped her less than two decades prior.

Again, none of this was allowed to be heard by the jury that awarded Carroll nearly $85 million today, in addition to the $5.5 million another Manhattan jury already awarded her in her first case.

CONWAY, JONG-FAST, EPSTEIN, HALEY, HOFFMAN.

Carroll has admitted that she first considered bringing a suit against Trump during a house party hosted by far-left blogger Molly Jong-Fast.

Jong-Fast, a writer for the viciously ‘Never Trump’ publications the Atlantic, the Bulwark, the Daily Beast, and Vanity Fair, is the daughter of feminist activist Erica Jong and anti-gun author Jonathan Fast. She is also the granddaughter of communist author Howard Fast.

On one evening in 2019, Jong-Fast held a celebration for Kathy Griffin at her New York home. Griffin had recently been in the news for holding up a bloodied, severed prop head of President Donald Trump, suffering public backlash which she claimed “broke” her.

But while Griffin was being pieced back together by Jong-Fast and company at the “Resistance Twitter come to life” party, lawyer George Conway, once married to Trump’s pollster Kellyanne Conway, was convincing Jean Carroll to sue Donald Trump. Conway has form in this area, once being involved with an effort to sue Bill Clinton.

According to reporter Byron York: “Conway even suggested a lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who had co-founded a #MeToo legal defense nonprofit group called Time’s Up. Kaplan was apparently deeply committed to helping victims of sexual abuse but deeply committed to politics, too: In August 2021, she resigned from Time’s Up over sexual misconduct allegations against New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The problem was Kaplan was not standing up for victims but was “involved in an effort to discredit one of Mr. Cuomo’s alleged victims,” according to a New York Times report. The E. Jean Carroll case would be a mix of sex and politics but with a Republican villain.”

In other words, Kaplan was using Carroll as a means by which to repair her reputation, having attacked Governor Cuomo’s alleged victims. Kaplan – supposedly no relation to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Trump case – indeed became E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer.

So, who would fund the case? Perhaps someone else looking to do damage control as it was emerging that he visited disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious island. Enter LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who Carroll even initially lied about, when she was asked if someone was funding the operation against Trump.

“Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?” she was asked during a deposition, responding: “No.” This lie soon fell apart, and Roberta Kaplan was forced to write a letter that stated: “During the course of preparing for her testimony at trial, Ms. Carroll has recollected additional information… While Ms. Carroll stands by that testimony about this case being a contingency case, she now recalls that at some point, her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”

That funding was from Hoffman’s American Future Republic group. But the coincidences don’t stop there.

Recently, Reid Hoffman was found to be a major donor to the primary campaign of Trump’s only remaining competitor: Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Haley. What a small world. Hoffman even bragged to New York Magazine’s Kara Swisher: “I will spend as much as I possibly can… [to beat Trump].”

THE EXPERT.

In attempting to put a valuation on the so-called “damage” done to E. Jean Carroll by Trump’s repeated refusal to accept the charges of rape, Roberta Kaplan called “expert” Ashlee Humphreys, a liberal professor who had posed as a reputation consultant against Rudy Giuliani in his recent Georgia case.

When cross-examined, Humphreys admitted to having no “real-world” expertise in reputation repair, and a National Pulse investigation found that she has a long track record of contributions to Democrat political groups — making numerous donations through “ActBlue,” which facilitated Black Lives Matter funds, and “Swing Left,” with Federal Election Commission records showing her donating history included supporting candidates, as well as political action committee work and projects such as “Stop Republicans.”

During the trial, it was also revealed that Carroll had deleted evidence of the alleged death threats she had received. The same death threats that formed part of the jury’s rationale for awarding her nearly $100 million. When Trump lawyer Alina Habba moved for a mistrial on this basis, she was rudely fobbed off by Kaplan. The judge. Not the lawyer. Such behavior was commonplace in the Manhattan courtroom over the course of the trial. Even when it was revealed that Carroll illegally owns a firearm in New York State, the global media paid no mind.

Trump, for his part, was barely allowed to say a word when he took the stand. The judge ordered no new evidence be admitted, and no new testimony was allowed. Just as is the case with Trump’s inability to defend himself from rape allegations in public, the judge insisted he was not able to make that claim in court, either. In which case, you might ask, what was the trial’s point? You would be correct to ask the question. The answer, of course, is “show.”

Show trials like this are not commonplace in the Western world. But it happened in New York in 2024. And everyone should be wary. If someone can accuse Trump, without evidence, of a crime committed 30 years ago. If the judge demands Trump may not defend himself. If they can get away with a wildly arbitrary number concocted by a lawyer trying to repair her own reputation, and an overtly partisan “expert” who admits no real-world experience in her supposed field of expertise – all against one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. Well, then, think about what they can do to you.