RadixJournal - May 10, 2023


＂They Let You Do It＂ Addendum


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

120.80782

Word count

1,322

Sentence count

96

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A verdict has been reached in the Trump defamation case against E.J. Carrol, who accused Donald Trump of rape and sexual assault. A jury has now come back with a verdict, and it's a mixed one.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, this is Richard, and welcome back to my journal.
00:00:05.320 Today I'm going to add an addendum to the journal entry I posted last night on E. Jean Carroll
00:00:13.480 and her claims of defamation and sexual misconduct against President Donald Trump.
00:00:22.540 I've rethought some things here and there, and I just wanted to add this.
00:00:25.960 Secondly, we have news. The jury did not need to deliberate for very long.
00:00:33.980 They went away to talk, they came back rather quickly with a verdict.
00:00:40.720 It's a unanimous verdict. It's also a mixed verdict.
00:00:46.620 So E. Jean Carroll was claiming that Donald Trump engaged in rape. 0.99
00:00:54.940 She's also claiming that Donald Trump engaged in sexual misconduct, assault,
00:01:01.940 and she's claiming that he defamed her on Truth Social by saying something to the effect, 1.00
00:01:09.120 you know, this is a massive hoax, and she is an inveterate liar. 1.00
00:01:14.580 It's all part of the witch hunt. 0.88
00:01:15.740 So that was apparently a defamation, and according to E. Jean Carroll, she got her life back via this verdict.
00:01:25.780 I spoke with the group about this on our members-only group podcast, you could say.
00:01:36.780 So if you weren't subscribed, I would recommend that you do that.
00:01:40.620 And I actually did talk through this with someone who, you know, has a legal mind,
00:01:47.100 and I think I kind of nuanced my views on it a little bit.
00:01:52.680 I obviously stand behind what I said about 24 hours ago, but I just wanted to add a little more nuance.
00:02:00.500 I was stressing last night that this whole defamation case probably shouldn't see the light of day
00:02:08.160 in the sense that you are mixing different thresholds.
00:02:15.480 So the threshold for a crime, rape and sexual assault are obviously crimes, is beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:02:22.740 But then we're moving, this is a civil trial, it's not a criminal trial.
00:02:29.620 And in such a trial, it is, the threshold is more likely than not.
00:02:36.140 So I did feel like this was rather contradictory.
00:02:39.140 Now, my interlocutor did mention something that is very important.
00:02:46.100 And that is that there can be civil trials, even if there's no, civil trials involving what would seem to be a criminal matter.
00:03:02.880 Even if that person was not put forward in a criminal trial, and even if he were found not guilty.
00:03:09.980 And in fact, there's an extremely famous example, and that is the O.J. Simpson trial.
00:03:15.000 So, as I'm sure you know, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty in what I think most everyone feels to be a miscarriage of justice back in the 1990s.
00:03:28.260 He was found liable for wrongful death in a civil trial, and I think that decision might have led to a lot of his undoing.
00:03:39.800 Although, you know, whatever you want to say about O.J., he seems to be back on his feet, putting forth Twitter videos, making bold and accurate predictions on NFL football.
00:03:53.060 It's a rather surreal experience watching those.
00:03:55.700 But anyway, the whole point is that he was found not guilty, and a civil trial preceded.
00:04:03.500 So, perhaps I was kind of overdoing it in stressing that there's this, you know, kind of inherent contradiction.
00:04:13.240 I still do think there are contradictions to this.
00:04:16.440 I mean, it is very obvious that this is a political hit job, that it is motivated by politics.
00:04:25.820 It's funded by Reid Hoffman, among others.
00:04:28.580 He of Netflix fame.
00:04:30.000 It involves Roberta Kaplan.
00:04:31.900 I mean, I don't really need to go on.
00:04:34.180 That being said, I do believe E. Jean Carroll, when she claims that something happened in Bergdorf's in the mid-90s involving Donald Trump,
00:04:50.120 and that Donald Trump was behaving like Donald Trump.
00:04:57.180 I do think that that is most likely correct. 1.00
00:05:01.300 So, in New York, rape is defined by inserting the penis in a non-consensual manner into the vagina. 1.00
00:05:14.020 That is rape. 1.00
00:05:14.840 Now, there are other forms of sexual misconduct, obviously, assaults and harassment and all those kinds of things.
00:05:22.940 So, the jury decided that, more likely than not, Donald Trump did not rape E. Jean Carroll.
00:05:36.080 And I think that they were probably on to something with that.
00:05:41.680 One of the reasons that I do think that E. Jean Carroll is telling the truth is the scenario that she recounted in her memoir just seems very plausible.
00:05:56.540 I can see something like this happening.
00:05:58.980 Donald Trump is a star, you know, in his estimation.
00:06:02.560 He's hanging out at some fancy department store.
00:06:07.000 He sees this pretty girl.
00:06:08.860 One thing leads to another, and Donald Trump acts like Donald Trump.
00:06:12.500 So, it seems plausible.
00:06:14.360 She didn't come up with some hair-raising scenario that is just a bit too much to be believed,
00:06:24.280 particularly due to the fact that she did not make a criminal complaint when it happened.
00:06:30.620 Now, she did talk to two friends, and they corroborated her story.
00:06:46.640 So, there's that.
00:06:50.320 But she described a scenario that just simply seems plausible.
00:06:56.960 But the jury didn't believe her that she was raped, and she did claim that she was raped.
00:07:04.920 And thus, when Donald Trump says this was a, you know, massive hoax and con job and things like that,
00:07:17.900 couldn't you say that, in a way, he's right?
00:07:21.340 I mean, the jury—or couldn't you say that the jury, in a way, agrees with him?
00:07:25.120 They are basically calling E. Jean Carroll a liar.
00:07:31.980 They are saying that, no, it's not even beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:07:36.480 It's more likely than not, you were not raped. 0.77
00:07:39.100 And yet, you are claiming to have been raped.
00:07:41.260 And we don't believe you. 0.99
00:07:44.340 You could say that.
00:07:45.320 I do think that there remain inherent contradictions to this kind of verdict.
00:07:52.420 Now, the legal person who I spoke to also mentioned something important with regard to the OJ situation,
00:08:00.100 and that is that claims against intentionality don't happen very often.
00:08:07.740 And these kinds of things, these civil trials are mostly going to happen, you know,
00:08:14.240 regarding wrongful death or injury or whatever, when, in effect, they're covered by insurance.
00:08:20.600 So, you know, if someone dies at the factory where he works, there's obviously not an intent to kill him.
00:08:30.720 It's not that kind of criminality.
00:08:34.100 But there are insurance programs that can cover this so that there is some restitution, the family or something is made whole.
00:08:44.620 Now, there obviously can be no rape insurance for the perpetrator in the sense of, you know,
00:08:51.480 maybe Andrew Tate would want to take out such a program, who knows.
00:08:55.660 But so it just becomes less likely that someone's going to pay.
00:09:01.540 And that's just the beginning of kind of the difficulties of situations like this.
00:09:06.840 So this kind of intentional liability and defamation, this strikes me as quite novel.
00:09:23.120 And I don't think that, and to be honest, I really don't think it should hold up.
00:09:33.580 Obviously, Trump's going to appeal.
00:09:36.200 He has a lawyer that's used to this kind of, who's used to this kind of stuff.
00:09:41.400 And it just still, the whole thing just strikes me as so convoluted that I find it a little bit difficult to take seriously.
00:09:53.020 Also, I think I mentioned last night that, you know, this sets a precedent and it can be used in other different cases.
00:10:01.600 It could be used against people who aren't as wealthy and powerful as Donald Trump.
00:10:08.580 You know, it does set a precedent, but I'm not sure it would be because I think this was a fairly unique case that was constructed.
00:10:19.700 It was a novel case constructed by Roberta Kaplan, among others.
00:10:25.260 And it's just so obviously politically motivated that I'm not sure it's going to really be tried again.
00:10:35.720 This is the way of using the court system as opposed to the ballot box or using the court system as a way of punishing a political opponent.
00:10:49.220 Now, in Trump's case, we did actually use the ballot box and he lost pretty bigly.