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Tag: rape charges
By Suing ABC's Stephanopoulos, Trump Renews Attention To Carroll Rape Verdict

By Suing ABC's Stephanopoulos, Trump Renews Attention To Carroll Rape Verdict

Donald Trump is facing criticism for suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation after the host said the ex-president had been found liable for “rape.”

“In an interview on This Week, Stephanopoulos pressed Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, a rape survivor, over her continued support of Trump after a jury found he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $88 million for battery and defamation,” CNN reports. “Stephanopoulos asserted multiple times in the interview with Mace that Trump had ‘raped’ Carroll.”

“You endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony that we just saw?” Stephanopoulos asked Mace, as CNN reported.

A federal jury did not find Carroll had proved Trump had raped her, but Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan later “concluded that the claim Trump raped Carroll was ‘substantially true,'” according to CNN.

“Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr Trump, the fact that Mr Trump ‘raped her’, albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations,” Judge Kaplan wrote.

Attorney George Conway took Trump to task while offering some legal insight.

“The theory of Trump’s complaint here is that, since the jury in Carroll II, the case tried last year, unanimously found that Trump forcibly and without consent penetrated Carroll’s vagina with his fingers and not his penis, and since this constituted sexual assault and not rape as defined by the New York Penal Code, Stephanopoulos libeled him by saying he had been held liable for ‘rape,’ even though the judge in the Carroll case has held multiple times since the verdict that in common parlance (and the law of most other jurisdictions) forcible digital penetration is rape,” Conway writes.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

DSK Maid Does Newsweek Tell-All

Worth the look:

The maid hovered in the suite’s large living room, just inside the entrance. The 32-year-old Guinean, an employee of the Sofitel hotel, had been told by a room-service waiter that room 2806 was now free for cleaning, “Hello? Housekeeping,” the maid called out again. No reply. The door to the bedroom, to her left, was open, and she could see part of the bed. She glanced around the living room for luggage, saw none. “Hello? Housekeeping.” Then a naked man with white hair suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere.

That’s how Nafissatou Diallo describes the start of the explosive incident on Saturday, May 14, that would forever change her life—and that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and, until that moment, the man tipped to be the next president of France. Now the woman known universally as the “DSK maid” has broken her public silence for the first time, talking for more than three hours with NEWSWEEK at the office of her attorneys, Thompson Wigdor, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.

Prosecutors Leak: We May Have Screwed Up The DSK Case

The New York Times, which had owned the story of IMF Head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on rape charges and had been a favored venue of damaging leaks from police and prosecutors, reported a different kind of leak late Thursday night: the Manhattan District Attorney’s office now believes its case is falling apart because problems with the credibility of Strauss-Kahn’s accuser:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.

In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

Today, the defense is expected to successfully win more lenient bail conditions for Strauss-Kahn. It’s a major blow for the prosecution — and lends a bit more credence to those French complaints that we vulgar Americans were rushing to judgment.