Trump Accuser's Social Media Posts Return to Light, Cast Even More Doubt on Her Story
Here’s some advice for the former advice columnist who just won $5 million from Donald Trump: Stop talking.
Because the longer E. Jean Carroll and her attorney keep their case in the public eye, the longer normal Americans who don’t sit on juries in deep-blue Manhattan will have to question just how credible her story is.
And that means they’ll have longer to wonder about Carroll’s social media posts about Trump that would make raise questions in any normal person’s mind.
As the establishment media trumpeted far and wide last week, Carroll on May 9 was awarded $5 million by a federal jury in New York, which found the now-former president had defamed Carroll when he denied her accusation that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.
The jury awarded her about $2 million on her sexual battery claim and roughly $3 million for defamation.
Trump, who has steadfastly denied the accusation, filed to appeal the verdict — which isn’t much of a surprise.
But what might be more surprising is that Carroll and her attorney, Robbie Kaplan, aren’t content to simply bank the $5 million while pursuing further legal action against the former president based on similar grounds behind closed doors.
Instead, Carroll and Kaplan appeared Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” one of the homes of the “Russia-collusion” hoax during the Trump presidency.
And that kind of publicity just gives more time for the American public to consider Carroll’s case — particularly posts she published on Facebook years after the alleged assault.
As the conservative website Twitchy noted last week, Carroll not only called herself a “massive” fan of Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” in a 2012 post, but in another tweet from the same year, she posed the question: “Would you have sex with Donald Trump for $17,000? (Even if you could A) Give the money to Charity? B) Close your eyes? And he’s not allowed to speak?)”
This screen shot of E Jean Carroll Facebook message is starting to circulate. Interesting timing of it.
I cant confirm or deny it but I found the timing odd that it started its rounds…
IF TRUE, She asked if you would have *** with Donald Trump for $17,000.
I watch patterns and… pic.twitter.com/thSsDBExeI— Kagens Looking Glass (@KagensNews) May 9, 2023
Carroll herself has admitted publishing the comments, so let’s just say they’re extremely odd coming from a woman about a man she claims committed a violent, vile act against her more than a decade before.
It’s true that the jury in the Carroll-Trump case knew about these posts. As Politico reported May 1, Trump’s attorney questioned her about them on the witness stand during the trial. Carroll said Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” was “witty,” according to the report.
It’s also obvious that the jurors in the case clearly didn’t have a doubt about how they were going to decide.
The jury deliberated for all of three hours, according to NBC News — about the same as the jury deliberations in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial before Simpson was acquitted in 1996.
To most Americans, the brevity of the deliberations in the Simpson trial was a clear indication the jury had long before made up its mind that it could not convict one of the most beloved celebrities in the country. (The facts that alleged racism played a key role in the Simpson defense, and that Simpson’s jury was almost entirely minorities — including eight black jurors, according to The Washington Post — might have had a lot to do with it.)
To a fair-minded observer of the Carroll-Trump case, the brevity of the deliberations meant the jury had long ago made up its mind that it was going to put the hooks on a politician almost unanimously reviled in Manhattan.
Consider also that the Carroll-Trump case was in civil court, where the standard of proof, as CNN noted, is a “preponderance of evidence” that a given assertion is true, rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” So, jurors in Manhattan were basically asked whether they thought it was more likely than not that Trump was lying about something.
Most liberal New Yorkers wouldn’t have had to get out of bed to answer “yes” to that.
In a jurisdiction so deeply controlled by Democrats that a hack like Alvin Bragg can become district attorney, it’s pretty clear the three hours the jurors spent deliberating was nailing down the details. The verdict was, evidently, a foregone conclusion.
The social media posts aren’t the only issues that cast doubt on Carroll’s story.
The fact that the incident allegedly occurred in the mid-1990s but she never brought it to light publicly until 2019, when #MeToo mania was sweeping the country and Carroll was selling a book that contained the accusation, also made it questionable.
Her utterly bizarre interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper — in which she claimed that “most people think of rape as being sexy. They think of the fantasies” — did even more.
The merits of considering rape as a sexual fantasy are subjective, of course, and Carroll is entitled to her own opinion of how “most” people think of it. (It also might say a lot about her circle of friends, or the people who wrote her column for advice.)
But in the context of an actual rape accusation that she is making about a crime against herself, her manner during the interview went a long way toward undermining her case.
(The fact that she told Cooper, “You’re fascinating to talk to,” at the end of the exchange didn’t help.)
Sexual offenses routinely go unreported for a variety of reasons, but the idea that this accusation against probably the most famous man in the world stayed hidden for so long, only to be revealed just when the Salem witch-hunt atmosphere of #MeToo was reaching its high point, should make even the most charitable observer more than a little skeptical.
But when a woman claims to have been raped by a man but has been seen going public with apparently unsolicited praise for his television show, it looks shaky.
When she lightheartedly posts a question for social media followers about their willingness to have sex with the man for a given amount of money, it looks damning.
The jury that decided Carroll’s case against Trump came from an infinitesimal sliver of Americans for whom Trump Derangement Syndrome has been a pathology for years. In the vastness of a country of more than 300 million souls, things are considerably different.
That’s who E. Jean Carroll and her counselor are talking to now — even if the immediate audience is made up of MSNBC freaks.
She should take some advice to shut up now. Her credibility is taking a worse beating with every word.
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