The E. Jean Carroll case against Trump shows our morally corrupt legal system

 The headline is that a jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in her defamation claim against Donald Trump. What’s behind the headline is infinitely more important, for it shows how America’s leftist-run judicial system works.

I should explain that I come with a strong bias to this matter. I worked as a litigator for almost thirty years in the San Francisco Bay Area. That experience left me with an abiding hatred for leftist judges.

They routinely showed themselves to be disinterested in law and facts. Instead, they used their powerful positions to dispense “justice”—only their idea of “justice” was whatever comported with leftist ideology. That meant that landlords lost, banks lost, insurance companies lost, and anyone else whom the judges didn’t like lost—and they lost for dishonest reasons. I never minded losing a case I knew was weak; I resented losing a good case, and I became conservative for that reason.

Image: E. Jean Carroll. YouTube screen grab.

All of which gets me the judicial system in the case of Trump and E. Jean Carroll. Here are some pertinent facts:

In 2012, NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had a scene in which a character talked about role-playing a rape fantasy in Bergdorf Goodman:

“Role-play took place in the dressing room of Bergdorf’s. While she was trying on lingerie I would burst in,” the character says.

In 2019, for the first time ever, Carroll said publicly that Trump had sexually assaulted her in 1994 in a dressing room in Bergdorf Goodman, an assault that lasted three minutes.

Also in 2019, Carroll explained on CNN that “most people think of rape as being sexy.” I don’t know those “most people.” Do you?

When Trump heard Carroll’s claims, he denied them, which is what every man does when accused of rape, especially if he’s innocent. He also claimed that (a) he didn’t know Carroll and (b) that he would never have gone near her as she was a “whack job” and wasn’t “his type.”

Carroll countered the claim that Trump didn’t know her by digging up a picture of her standing with Trump and Ivana at a party in 1987 as proof that they did know each other. Under the standard of “having talked briefly at a party,” I know or have known George H. W. Bush, Brit Hume, Peggy Fleming, California governors Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson, violinists Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, all of whom are just some of the many famous people I’ve briefly talked to at parties. I can assure you, though, that none of them know me.

In 2019, because the statute of limitations for rape—a serious crime—had long since expired, Carroll sued Trump for defamation, claiming that his repudiation of the rape allegation harmed her professionally and hurt her feelings. Given that she went into the stratosphere on the left after she attacked Trump, I’ve struggled to understand her claim of professional harm, but whatever.

Of course, the defamation claim worked only if Carroll could prove that she was stating the truth when she accused Trump of rape. But as noted above, Carroll never pressed that claim in a timely criminal proceeding, when there might be physical evidence, and memories would be fresh—so fresh that Carroll would have remembered the year in which this traumatizing (or “sexy”) event happened. Instead, Carroll admitted that the clothes she claimed to have worn when assaulted weren’t manufactured until a later date. Therefore, so she adjusted her allegations to say Trump’s assault occurred in 1995 or 1996.

In 2022, New York State upped the ante against Trump by passing its “Adult Survivors Act,” a law intended solely to create a window of time in which Carroll could file a civil sexual assault suit against Trump. Carroll promptly filed suit against Trump and reiterated her defamation claim. Incidentally, Reid Hoffman, a major Democrat party and Nikki Haley donor, helped fund her litigation.

In May 2023, based upon allegations that were almost 20 years old and came with no corroborating evidence—and, of course, were not subject to the stringent “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof for a criminal case—the first trial against Trump began. The judge refused to admit the infamous Access Hollywood tape into evidence, explaining that it proved that Trump had admitted to assaulting women. In fact, the tape clearly shows that Trump simply said that when you’re rich and powerful, a certain class of woman will let you get away with anything. The judge also refused to admit into evidence Carroll’s comment about people finding rape “sexy.”

The jury concluded that Trump committed sexual abuse, battery, and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. Trump again asserted his innocence.

Carroll promptly sought more damages because of Trump’s post-verdict denials of wrongdoing. The judge in this second trial precluded any evidence about Trump’s alleged wrongdoings; instead, he explicitly and graphically told the jury that the prior jury trial proved indisputably that Trump was guilty of sexual assault.

On Friday, the jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million against Trump in damages for defamation and emotional distress. Carroll’s attorney said that part of the verdict came about because the jury was offended that Trump didn’t respect the judge. That is not a sound legal basis for a jury award and, standing alone, demands reversal.

I’ve been careful just to state the facts here. You can draw your own conclusions.

Having said that, and continuing in journalistic mode, meaning that I neither confirm nor dispute the statements below but report them solely as news, here is Trump’s summation of the case against him, which he published before the verdict:

After the verdict, Trump had this to say:

I have no comment about Carroll’s veracity. I can only say that the New York system, from the legislature down to the judge on the case, had a very specific outcome in mind: Politically, it would benefit Democrats to have a guilty verdict against Trump. This is not how the justice system is supposed to work (and that is true whether the verdict was righteous or not). Instead, what played out in New York was a combination of government and judicial tyranny that is devastating to a free country.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/01/the_e_jean_carroll_case_against_trump_shows_our_morally_corrupt_legal_system.html