Richard discusses his thoughts on E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump—and why the reasoning is too convoluted to see the light of day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| Hello, everyone, and welcome back to my journal. | |
| I am going to talk briefly about the civil case that Donald Trump is involved with. | |
| He is being sued by E. Jean Carroll. | |
| It's taking place in New York City, and both the plaintiffs and the defense have rested. | |
| And the jury is deliberating, so I want to get this in before we know the verdict. | |
| I think the verdict might very well be for the plaintiff. | |
| That is, Donald Trump is going to be responsible for renouncing his earlier claims against E. Gene Carroll. | |
| And he might be responsible for a lot of money. | |
| We will see. | |
| But I want to talk about why I think this type of case is fraudulent in itself. | |
| And that's a more complicated argument. | |
| And I want to also talk just about the immediate political fallout from all this. | |
| So I will start there. | |
| Whatever the verdict is, this case has been an absolute disaster for Donald Trump, personally, for Trump World, etc. | |
| The chickens have finally come home to roost with the grab-em-by-the-pussy tape that, of course, was revealed in 2016, an October surprise. | |
| And was damaging then, although Trump pulled out a miraculous win. | |
| And I think this is a point at which, again, the chickens have come home to roost, that Donald Trump is ultimately having to pay for those comments. | |
| Because I do think that this is a political case. | |
| It's being done by... | |
| Roberta Kaplan. | |
| It's being funded by Reid Hoffman, Netflix fame. | |
| And it ultimately derives from what was a political act and not necessarily a criminal act. | |
| That is, it ultimately derives from the grab-em-by-the-pussy tape. | |
| And it doesn't necessarily derive from a crime. | |
| And I think that's the real problem. | |
| And that's why I think everyone, no matter how you feel about Trump, I was famously very excited about Trump at one point. | |
| I'm much less so now, to say the least. | |
| But I think someone should take his defense on this matter in the sense that this type of case is fraudulent in itself and could be misused in a whole host of different ways. | |
| But anyway, let's get back to the immediate political fallout. | |
| Trump never took the stand. | |
| You don't have to in a civil matter. | |
| And he didn't even show up in court. | |
| Again, you don't have to in a civil matter. | |
| He did show up via videotape of his deposition and the highlights that we've seen from that deposition, which I'm sure was hours upon hours, but we're only seeing a few minutes here and there. | |
| Anyway, those highlights are disastrous. | |
| I agree that they might be funny on some level, but they are super disastrous, and I think Trump in many ways couldn't help himself. | |
| He just had to act like an edgelord and say these things. | |
| It's part of his personality. | |
| It's in a way what made him great and what might very well bring him down. | |
| So just some highlights of these. | |
| He misidentified E. Jean Carroll and his own ex-wife, Marla Maples. | |
| So he was shown a photo in this deposition. | |
| First off, there was an odd way in which Trump was either playing dumb or he's having serious memory issues. | |
| He couldn't quite remember when he was married to Ivana, when he was married to Marla, when he was married to his current beautiful wife, Melania. | |
| And he was shown this photo, and he said, oh yeah, that's Marla. | |
| And he was corrected. | |
| No, that was in fact E. Jean Carroll. | |
| And they're different people, but they look fairly similar. | |
| So his claim after this accusation was made was basically the same claim that Sorghum of Arkad made, that is Carl Benjamin. | |
| On Twitter at some point, where he said, I wouldn't even rape you. | |
| I guess a backhanded compliment, if there ever was one. | |
| Very, very much an edgelord comment. | |
| And he said that, oh, she's not my type, so I wouldn't sexually assault her. | |
| Again, that's a very odd thing to say, as opposed to just a blanket denial. | |
| No, I didn't do this. | |
| That would have been a lot easier, but Trump had to kind of twist it. | |
| Well, it seems like she very much was his type. | |
| He thought she was Marla Maples, in fact, whom he had a long-term affair with throughout the 80s. | |
| It was played out in the tabloids. | |
| I can remember as a kid going to the supermarket and seeing People magazine and Trump and Marla and Ivana and all this kind of stuff going on. | |
| So that was a... | |
| Huge disaster. | |
| The other thing, he said something that was truthful, but obviously doesn't really serve him. | |
| And he said that he basically affirmed the grab him by the pussy tape. | |
| Because, you know, a lot of people listen to that tape and they said, oh, look, he's confessing to a sexual assault. | |
| Well, it was locker room talk in many ways. | |
| He was talking very generally. | |
| He was not confessing to a specific crime. | |
| But there's also this interesting quality to it where it's like, okay, is he being offensive? | |
| Yes or no, but is he right or not? | |
| Yes or no. | |
| And he affirmed this, that for the last million years, if you were a star of some kind, I guess a star in the age of the cavemen, you were really good at clubbing the other tribes. | |
| And so it's a comment on female nature and not just man's nature. | |
| All of this might very well be true, but it's just not the thing to say in a deposition. | |
| And so I think that also was a disaster. | |
| So, again, even if he gets out of this, even if he wins on appeal, I still think this is highly damaging. | |
| But I want to talk more about the case itself and why it's fraudulent. | |
| I think it's not necessarily being misrepresented by the media, but it's being misrepresented in headlines and how people talk about it. | |
| So it's often referred to as the Trump rape trial. | |
| Well, it's not a rape trial. | |
| It is a defamation trial. | |
| So we're distanced already by a valence away from the actual alleged crime. | |
| The rape... | |
| It sounds a little bit more like a sexual assault to me, but I don't want to split hairs here. | |
| But the crime occurred in the mid-90s. | |
| Trump's lawyer made something of the fact that E.G. Carroll couldn't quite remember when it happened. | |
| Was it 95 or 96 or something like that? | |
| Well, I think that's actually fair. | |
| I was in high school in the mid-90s and, you know, did this... | |
| Did this event happen senior year? | |
| Was it sophomore year? | |
| I can't quite remember. | |
| I think that's fair. | |
| And I also don't think E. Jean Carroll is making it up, actually. | |
| And I'll go into more of that a little bit later. | |
| But what happened, according to Carroll, and she wrote this in an autobiography, and she actually didn't mention Trump by name, but it acted as a kind of Romana Clef. | |
| Everyone knew it was Trump. | |
| You know, so on and so forth. | |
| So they were at Bergdorf department store, fancy place, and he asked her to help him buy a present, and he said, oh, I want to get this woman a fur cap, and she said, oh, you should never put an animal on your head, and then maybe we'll do a bodysuit or something like that. | |
| One thing led to another, and Trump pushed her up against the wall, and a Apparently digitally penetrated her. | |
| So I guess you could call this rape on some level. | |
| Now, what do I think of this? | |
| I think that E. Jean Carroll is, in all likelihood, being truthful. | |
| In other words, I believe her. | |
| Now, I don't believe all women or something like that. | |
| I think there certainly are many cases of lying to get revenge or so on. | |
| But I believe E. Jean Carroll. | |
| I think she's a credible person. | |
| She strikes me as a rather, you know, she's exuberant and kind of a goofy woman. | |
| But I almost say that as a compliment. | |
| She's kind of the... | |
| Fun girl that you would want to talk to or be friends with or have at a party. | |
| I think she's credible. | |
| I don't think she's lying. | |
| I think something like this might very well have happened. | |
| I tend to believe her. | |
| No one has firm evidence here, but I tend to believe her. | |
| I don't think she's on the war path. | |
| Now, you could ask... | |
| Why didn't she go to the police immediately afterwards? | |
| You could ask a lot of questions about that. | |
| This wasn't a rape like you would think of in, say, Central Park, where someone grabs you, knocks you over the head, and takes you behind the bushes or something like that. | |
| It wasn't nearly that violent. | |
| Perhaps in the world of... | |
| Donald Trump, this kind of thing is fairly normal. | |
| He certainly makes it seem that way. | |
| He's done this to many different women. | |
| Maybe E. Jean Curl wasn't quite sure that it was a crime. | |
| Maybe she was embarrassed by the whole thing. | |
| She didn't want to be scandalized. | |
| Maybe she had some mixed feelings herself about the matter. | |
| Maybe she felt a little... | |
| Guilty about being aroused by it. | |
| And I don't say that to make some kind of edgelord comment. | |
| Human sexuality is a very complicated thing. | |
| And Freud was right in many ways. | |
| We often fear what we desire, and we desire what we fear. | |
| So maybe she had some ambivalent feelings about this and didn't want to come forward, and then... | |
| In retrospect, you know, 30 years on, she's able to process it and describe it. | |
| Again, I'm not saying this in any way as an insult towards E.G. Carroll. | |
| I think it's a very human response. | |
| But the fact is, there is no direct evidence of this. | |
| There was a legal battle about the dress that she wore. | |
| She claimed she didn't launder it. | |
| And there might have been Trump's DNA left there in some way. | |
| I don't even want to go into where that DNA would come from. | |
| But there was some deal between the plaintiffs and the defendants where it We'll give up Trump's DNA. | |
| Show us all of the DNA that's on the dress and so on. | |
| The judge said, well, it's too late for all this. | |
| The trial has to go forward. | |
| So the jury never heard about the dress. | |
| We don't get to reiterate the famous dress that reminds us of another infamous episode from the 1990s. | |
| That is the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky affair. | |
| Anyway, we don't have an actual crime. | |
| Whatever her reasons, Carol never would. | |
| We don't have any really firm evidence. | |
| What we do have evidence of is that Donald Trump is a jerk and that Donald Trump is the kind of guy who would do something like this. | |
| We also have evidence that E. Jean Carroll is a... | |
| Kind of an interesting lady, and I would say credible witness. | |
| So we have evidence of that. | |
| Of that, we can be sure. | |
| But we don't have any evidence of the crime. | |
| And this is the real issue of the civil suit. | |
| Again, you could file a civil suit about something that was a crime. | |
| For instance, there's a wrongful death civil suit. | |
| It's not murder in the criminal sense, but it obviously involves death. | |
| You could have a civil suit involving rape. | |
| But again, this isn't a civil suit involving rape. | |
| The statute of limitations is long passed. | |
| And again, could you prove that Donald Trump did this beyond a reasonable doubt? | |
| There have been some famous rape cases in which the only evidence was the word of the victim. | |
| So you could. | |
| But I think it's very unlikely. | |
| And they're not even trying that. | |
| So it's all moot. | |
| So we have this layer above the alleged crime that is a civil suit of defamation. | |
| Now, there are different standards in civil and criminal cases. | |
| As you know, I'm sure, in a criminal case, it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt. | |
| In other words, he did it. | |
| You know, no sensible person could dispute this. | |
| We got him dead to rights. | |
| That should be the standard for any kind of crime, whether it's a speeding ticket or whether it's murder or a sexual assault like what is being alleged. | |
| In a civil trial, the threshold you have to reach is lower. | |
| It's not a reasonable doubt. | |
| It's more like, Did he probably do this? | |
| It's 51%. | |
| It's not 99% certainty. | |
| So they build a civil case on top of an alleged crime that has never really been proven. | |
| And I fear that because of this mixing of the thresholds to reach a verdict, that Donald Trump is going to be... | |
| The jury will find for the plaintiffs on the basis that they are pretty sure that Donald Trump is the type of guy who would do something like this. | |
| Now, there's another matter involving this that I think is a little bit less interesting, which is what kind of defamation has actually occurred? | |
| What kind of damages has Carroll suffered? | |
| Due to Donald Trump's defaming of her. | |
| Now again, it's not the damages that she suffered due to the alleged crime. | |
| It's the damage that she suffered from Donald Trump lying about her. | |
| Those are very different things. | |
| And we're just mixing these two and mixing the thresholds where I don't think such a case should be allowed to take place. | |
| I'm not saying this as a Trump fanboy. | |
| I'm saying this as someone who actually cares about how this kind of thing could be used in the future. | |
| Let's say that it's not Donald Trump. | |
| It's some college guy who is being accused of defaming someone for the fact that he denied that he raped her. | |
| And they have evidence that, oh yeah, they were at this frat party together. | |
| Oh yeah, they were both drinking and he was hitting on her really hard. | |
| And when she went out to get something from her car, he followed her. | |
| So, mmm, it looks like he raped her. | |
| He definitely could have done it. | |
| Well, that level of evidence wouldn't really pass mustard. | |
| Pass mustard, excuse me. | |
| Wouldn't pass muster any criminal case. | |
| Yet, we are now in a situation where you could basically impugn this man's character and say, well, this is the type of frat boy jock asshole who would do things like this. | |
| So what are you really supposed to do in cases like this other than deny that you committed a crime? | |
| I mean, of course you're going to call someone a liar to some extent if they accuse you of a crime that you didn't commit. | |
| So what exactly are you supposed to do outside of risking a civil trial in which denying a criminal act is in itself defamation? | |
| I just think these things are so twisted. |