On Wednesday, one of the more bizarre exponents of the Left’s Trump-hating hysteria, E. Jean Carroll, was right back where she apparently always wants to be: in the news. Carroll, who is the author of the world-historical classic What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, claimed in a June 2019 article that back in 1997, Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. On Wednesday, Trump sat for a deposition in her defamation case, which she brought after Trump denied the rape charges.
Carroll’s improbable initial claim was delivered in the purplest of prose, after an extremely lengthy account of various “hideous men” she supposedly encountered during her long and celebrated life. Once she finally gets around to Trump, the reader is weary with all the hideousness she has had to endure, but Carroll is ready to lay on some more, and lay it on thick. Trump, she says, got her into a dressing room by tricking her into trying on a bodysuit so that he could see if it would be a suitable gift for an unnamed “girl” for whom he was shopping. Trump, in Carroll’s telling, was a ruthless and efficient attacker:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
It goes on from there, in a manner not suitable for reprinting in a family publication. And while all this happened in a crowded department store, Carroll would apparently have us believe that she didn’t make a sound, and none of it attracted the notice of a single one of the multitudes passing by. And while the portrait Carroll paints of the former president may be plausible to those who are ready to believe any accusation against him, the more lurid and fantastic the better, Trump himself maintained that she was “totally lying,” as well as “not my type.” That’s what got him the defamation suit; apparently Carroll is determined to prove that she is actually Trump’s type.
After all this cross talk, Carroll’s lawyers were mum about exactly what happened when Trump gave his deposition. Their statement was a model of terseness: “We’re pleased that on behalf of our client, E. Jean Carroll, we were able to take Donald Trump’s deposition today. We are not able to comment further.” Trump’s attorney Alina Habba, however, stated: “As we have said all along, my client was pleased to set the record straight today. This case is nothing more than a political ploy like many others in the long list of witch hunts against Donald Trump.”
Related: E. Jean Carroll Sues Trump for Defamation
That seems likely. Carroll didn’t help her case when she sat down with Anderson Cooper not long after she made her initial accusation, and the interview quickly turned into one of the most bizarre exchanges ever broadcast on national television. Cooper asked Carroll: “So you don’t feel like a victim?” To that, she responded strangely: “I was not thrown on the ground and ravished. Which, the word ‘rape’ carries so many sexual connotations. This was not sexual. It just, it hurt.”
Whether or not she was thrown to the ground and ravished has nothing whatsoever to do with Anderson Cooper’s question, or with the accusations she made against Trump. And her point about the rape not being sexual is likewise completely off any point Cooper was trying to get her to make. Cooper tried to get the proceedings back on track by gamely following up with: “I think most people think of rape as a violent assault. It is not sexual—” To that, E. Jean Carroll responded with her oddest statement of all: “I think most people think of rape as being sexy.”
At that point, Cooper tried his best to extricate himself from the situation, saying: “Let’s take a short break,” but Carroll was undeterred, and added: “Think of the fantasies.” Cooper, trying to keep things sane and child-friendly, doggedly repeated: “We’re going to take a short break.” Placating Carroll, he added: “If you could stick around we can talk more.” Appearing to be in full fantasyland mode by this point, Carroll responded: “You’re fascinating to talk to.”
But Trump, she says, defamed her. It would be interesting to see the text of his deposition. We can hope that Trump’s deposition will put a definitive end to these opportunistic and politically motivated accusations.
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