Rape is in full bloom

The other day I mentioned the emotional fervour contorting the faces of Trump’s fans and detractors alike. Love him or hate him is a cliché, but an apt one in this case.

People indeed either love him or hate him with hysterical passion. In public perception, poor Donald swings from saviour to devil incarnate, and the two extremes are at war.

As we know, all is fair in love and war. Replace love with rape, and you get weaponised sex used to slay Trump, as a politician at least.

Now, Donald doesn’t strike me as a man who’ll easily take an amorous no for an answer. He is a self-admitted practitioner of the ‘grab’em by the pussy’ school of wooing, and it’s conceivable that not every pussy he has ever grabbed purred with delight.

Hence, while his political persona makes him a figure of hate in some circles, his feline braggadocio makes him an easy target for accusations. That much is par for the course.

What I find amazing is that a case as frivolous as one brought against Trump by E. Jean Carroll ever got to trial. It’s one of those ex post facto rapes that have all the credibility of flying pigs, with tooth fairies sitting astride them. A porky, in other words.

Whoever defends Trump will have the easiest trial in his life – provided the trial is fair, which isn’t guaranteed in such cases these days. Just about every part of Miss Carroll’s story is open to doubt, if not ridicule.

According to her, almost 30 years ago she ran into Trump at New York’s upmarket department store Bergdorf Goodman (a “lovely place” according to my wife, an authority on the subject).

They had met before, but mostly knew each other by reputation. Carroll was an agony aunt working on TV and at Elle magazine; Trump was, well, Trump.

He asked Carroll to use her professional expertise to advise him on buying a gift for a girl. She agreed, and they travelled from department to department, eventually ending up in lingerie.

Trump picked a see-through body suit and asked Carroll to try it on for him. They went into a fitting room together, where he raped her. Call Trump frisky if you will, but what do you call a society woman in her 40s who is willing to model see-through underwear for a practical stranger?

According to her lawyers, “Trump’s sexual assault has caused Carroll to suffer lasting psychological harm, loss of dignity and intimate relationships, and invasion of her privacy.”

If so, one has to admire her fortitude: she has lived with that pain for 25-odd years before first crying out in 2019. Why wait so long?

When Carroll suffered her loss of dignity, she shared her misfortune with a couple of friends. Instead of advising herself in her professional capacity, she asked for their advice, and they told her not to bother. Trump, they said, had hundreds of lawyers who would “bury you”.

Perhaps. But how is today’s situation any different? Has the New York bar since declared Trump a persona non grata? Probably not. So he can still hire competent attorneys who must be glad Miss Carroll had to wait decades. Had she gone to the police immediately, some evidence other than hearsay could have come to light.

According to Miss Carroll, she tried to fight Trump off, but in vain. One wonders why she waged her battle in silence. Surely, had she cried out, a shopper or a sales clerk would have come to her aid?

Oh well, you see, there was nobody else on the lingerie floor. No shoppers, no sales clerks, no store detectives who normally watch out for potential shoplifters with an eagle eye. Nobody. This though Bergdorf is one of New York’s most popular department stores, and it’s located in Fifth Avenue, where the buzz of well-heeled shoppers is at its loudest.

An unlikely story, I’d say, and any sane jury would agree. Moreover, any sane prosecutors would refuse to put such a flimsy case before a jury.

Imagine for the sake of argument that Miss Carroll made a complaint identical in every detail except the defendant. Instead of the once, and possibly future, president and a billionaire, her putative assailant is, say, an accountant or a plumber.

So there’s Miss Carroll telling the police the accountant-plumber she barely knew asked her 25 years ago to model some see-through lingerie in an always busy department store… And so forth. What do you think the cops would tell her?

Or, should the bored cops decide to take the case to a DA just for fun, would the latter be willing to prosecute? It’s those tooth fairies again, riding the flying pigs.

If Miss Carroll indeed suffered that crime, my commiserations. Moreover, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to do something like that.

But, truth to tell, I’m not especially interested in either Miss Carroll or Mr Trump. I am, however, interested in our civilisation and its legal underpinnings. If a case like this can be taken seriously, our civilisation no longer can be.

Western criminal justice is based on evidence – not on the defendant’s status in life. And Western courts are places for establishing the truth, not arenas for politically motivated character assassinations. Even at the time the alleged rape took place, these places demanded more than just an accuser’s say-so to convict or even try a defendant.

But that was almost 30 years ago. Justice, that cornerstone of Western civility and polity, has since become tainted with faddish obsessions and political pressures. Any woman can now destroy any man’s life by a false accusation of sexual assault – the police, prosecutors and increasingly juries have their conscience drowned in the quagmire of wokery.

The damage will be done even if the defendant is acquitted. “You can beat the charge, but you can’t beat the ride,” say American policemen. Meaning that the very fact of a rape trial, especially if a public figure is involved, will make people talk about smoke, fire, and how the former is always caused by the latter.

Whatever we may think about Trump, I do hope American justice has enough residual sanity left to dismiss this case with the contempt it deserves. And if it doesn’t, that’ll be proof positive it’s no longer sane.