This is incredibly frustrating, and not at all uncommon.
Her story IS evidence. The details she tells - the location in a store, the context of the conversation, what actually happened - is evidence. People all the time get convicted of crimes based on people saying they happened when other people believe them.
Yes, you need to judge credibility. Did she ever actually meet him (yes; there’s a photo)? Are there any contemporary accounts (yes, she told two people)? Is it within the realm of possibilities (yes, he has a reputation, in part of his own making, of imposing his will on women without their consent)?
But all of that goes to the weight of the evidence. The fact is: Her story IS evidence.
Right, we don’t treat any other crime that way, that if the victim or witness doesn’t have some unusually high level of corroboration then ē’s obligated to never say anything to besmirch the reputation of the perpetrator. But accusing a man, particularly a powerful man, of sexual assault is somehow so rare and unbelievable that the silence of the victim is the paramount consideration.
Remember, to find someone liable for defamation, you have to prove ē’s lying. Why doesn’t that apply to Trump’s comments?
The normal channels are failing these women. So they’re speaking out. They’re not organizing vigilante squads, or lynching menfolk, or anything like that. They’re just telling their stories, loudly and to the media.
That should be welcomed, not denigrated. There’s no other option for so many of these women, since law enforcement has so often failed.
Despite your snark, yes, that is sort of how evidence works.
One side presents their story. The other side presents their story. Those deciding now have to decide who to believe.
How? No, not with “ties”, but with considering the weight of that evidence.
So, she told two people it happened, but he told two people it didn’t. What to do? Perhaps we should weigh the strength of those two stories. Realizing you are being facetious, if he really presented Don Jr and Melania as his two advocates, it should fail in a test of weight. Why? Because her stories were contemporaneous; he hadn’t met Melania at the time, and Don Jr. would have been about ten. So, based on your hypo, he made his denials decades after the fact. That’s not a tie; his evidence is weaker than hers.
Oh, please. Woman are not running wild in the streets bashing in men’s heads with baseball bats. They have merely stopped being silent in the face of assault and harassment.
Why are some men so determined to embarrass all other men?
Which is all well and good, except that’s not really the end of it. Now this group can tell their stories and do reputational damage to those they accuse, get them fired, make them lose jobs, pressure advertisers. Now there is a weapon that can be used outside of due process to go after anyone they want. It’s not like their hiding that this is going on or we are speculating about it. SJWs are doing just this openly in a variety of ways.
It’s a dangerous thing, and it’s already being abused.
Nope: Societal compact. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Due process. If somebody is unwilling to engage the justice system, they don’t have my support. The fact that it sometimes lets some people down and is imperfect is not an excuse not to start there.
You seem like a pretty woke guy, it’s not like you don’t already know this is going on. Why dance around it?
I’m unconvinced that this is being weaponized against the innocent. I’ve seen no evidence for it. Kavanaugh has suffered nothing (he’s at the peak of his profession), and I see no evidence his accusers were lying. Trump has certainly suffered nothing. The ones who have suffered are being prosecuted – they’ve either been found guilty (Cosby) or they will be tried (Weinstein).
I don’t believe false accusations are easy to manufacture – journalists actually check these things, and in my understanding they regularly get anonymous tips that they check and turn out to be baseless (and we never hear of).
Broadly speaking, society is still massively tilted in favor of powerful abusers and against their victims and survivors. Until we tilt it back to the point of fairness, I’m going to worry much, much more about those victims and survivors (and accusers) than the accused. You should too. Trump has a team of corrupt lawyers to denigrate and defame Carroll and defend him… he doesn’t need you.
In my head I hear you saying this to blacks suffering under Jim Crow laws and telling them that they should stop their sit-ins and marches because they are not engaging through the justice system.
Since the legal system keeps getting invoked, this might be of interest:
Traditionally, under rules of evidence, the prosecution is forbidden from presenting “propensity” evidence in the form of other bad acts to obtain a conviction. That is, if you want to prove a person committed a beating or robbery, for example, you can’t do so by presenting evidence of other beatings or robberies. (There are exceptions, and this is an area of much litigation).
But, under the federal rules of evidence, there is an exception for sex crimes. The courts specifically note that 1) there is often a lack of physical evidence in such cases and 2) sexual predators tend to have multiple victims, in allowing prosecutors to present other allegations to give credibility to a victim’s story.
Meaning, among the points to consider in judging this story, we should consider the stories of the other people who have accused Trump to decide whether this is likely true.
Okay. Out of ten sexual assaults reported to police, one may get convicted. We already know going in that the likelihood of getting a conviction is next to none. We know that.
I listened to an interview with Twohey and Kantor (those were the journalists that broke the Weinstein story). The women reporting on Weinstein were very much like David taking on Goliath. Many were actresses that wanted to work. You would not be getting parts by taking on Weinstein.
Anyway, Twohey and Kantor said the New York Times, in this situation, could give the women a platform to even the field.
After which, the LAPD looked BACK into reports formerly dismissed.
Larry Nassar’s reign of abuse and terror was finally broken by a campus cop that took the position of “Believe first”. This was after three or so women did report to the police, but Nassar talked his way out of it.
When he was finally convicted, over 200 women and girls testified at his sentencing.
Far less high-profile, there was recently a story of a young woman reporting a sexual assault to the police. His interview was filmed. Caught on film was the RCMP officer asking her if, on some level, she was turned on by the assault.
I wish I could say that going to the police will result in a fair examination of the evidence. If it would, then I actually believe that most of us would rather go that way. Most of us would rather there be a fair examination of the evidence, and not have our names and faces splashed everywhere.
But that is not how it works. Yet.
But I remain ever hopeful that it will. Things are changing. When I went in to report the instructor (finally!) the police office was kind, compassionate and fair. I left feeling supported. I don’t mean that I felt he would be unfair, but he accepted me at my word that something had happened.
That is how it should always work.
But we know it does not.
So, maybe this will get someone to take a second look at a case and make sure it was down properly - knowing it was often done poorly previously, shouldn’t we all want that?
That’s a statement that will be definitionally true in any circumstances. Switching who is on top isn’t a good solution, IMO.
Yeah. I agree. The problem is which is which. Turns out the kids on the Duke Lacrosse team ended up being the victims. You can’t determine who the victims are from stories, and tweets, and shit. There needs to be an actual process. You know, civilization and such.
I don’t care about him. I’m just surprised how gullible people are, and how susceptible to confirmation bias they are. Seems like some people will believe anything as long as it’s what they want to hear.
This case, to me is kind of a litmus test for gullibility. If you buy her act you have been drinking the Zkool aid way too long.
Those are really good examples. They make me happy as I hope they make you happy, not that bad things happened but that justice was finally served.
What these stories all have in common is that the victims sought justice by going through the justice system first. They went to the police. Some of them did not get satisfaction but there word was on record and it backed up later allegations. Some did not get satisfaction, and the pursued the media or alternative outlets to gain justice, which forced the justice system to take a look.
Of course, others, not mentioned, went to the justice system and never got satisfaction.
What these all have in common is that they went through the process society has put in place first. I think that is incredibly important and incredibly brave. I recognize how hard and risky and demeaning it must be to do it.
When someone does such a thing and does not get satisfaction, I listen very carefully. This is someone who has taken risk to put their word to the test. They are asking for help, and they deserve respect and careful consideration. They are invested in the process.
When someone first bypasses that process and attempts to use the media to get their way without first seeking due process I am incredibly skeptical, and suspicious.
I think this is correct.
The disagreement between us (if we have one) is that I want to see victims first avail themselves of the processes in place, before they seek alternate venues for justice.
Here’s the thing. She’s not “seeking justice”. She isn’t pressing charges. She isn’t suing. She IS trying to sell her book. As is her right in telling her story.
But you are conflating that with whether her story is true.
Why can’t it be both self-serving aggrandizement AND completely true?
Just because she doesn’t want to go to court doesn’t mean she isn’t telling the truth. Just because she is making money doesn’t make it true. In fact, the fact that she CAN use it to make money suggests it IS true: By your standard, Trump now must sue her for defamation, right? If he refuses to test its veracity in court, he’s conceding it happened, isn’t he?
When she was 18 years old, a man sneaked in through her window, bound and gagged her and raped her at knifepoint. She reported the rape. One of Marie’s former foster mothers, Peggy, thought Marie’s behavior was “fishy” for a recent rape victim, and she called up the police and told them that.
The police dropped the rape investigation, and charged Marie with filing a false report. Marie, burdened under the weight of all the pressure on her, decided she just wanted it to end and took a plea deal.
Some time later, two police investigators in nearby towns decided to work together on a series of rape cases. Their collaboration broadened, and took in more cases, they eventually found a serial rapist in Colorado, whose modus operandi exactly matched Marie’s original story.
This guy would choose a victim, study her movements, and then late at night break into her bedroom, bind her, gag her, threaten her with a knife, and them rape her. As it turned out, he also took pictures of all of his crimes in progress.
And what do you know, he had taken pictures of his rape of Marie, the Marie who reported her crime, and then because someone thought her story was “fishy,” the cops charged her with a misdemeanor, which then she didn’t have the strength left to fight.
This is how women who report rape are treated. They are re-victimized by the so-called justice system.
You’ve been traumatized. You just want to forget it. Maybe in your trauma, you go ahead and shower and clean yourself, because you can’t bear it.
People around you advise you to keep your mouth shut. You still decide to go to the police. The police try to persuade you that you imagined it, or you’re lying, or it’s not worth reporting. But you do it anyway. Then, if you didn’t think to avoid bathing, you might go for a rape kit test, a very intrusive, humiliating test, which itself is another trauma.
Okay, you do it. The cops throw the rape kit in storage. It never goes to the lab. Or it goes to the lab, and the lab throws it in a pile and never processes it. Or they process it and botch it. Anyway, the case goes nowhere.
And you’re left as the person who claimed to have been raped. You might be ostracized by your family, your friends, your community. Everyone looks at you differently. You go on dates who get freaked out that you once reported a rape. If they don’t believe you, they hate you. If they believe you, they see you as a “ruined” person.
If the case is indeed investigated and indeed goes to trial, the chances are slim that there will be a conviction. The whole process will be a trauma that lasts for years. And then if there’s a conviction, there’s a good chance that the punishment will be negligible.
In the meantime, your entire life has become that rape. You are stuck for years, maybe decades, maybe for the rest of your life, in that moment just because you decided that “hard is fucking authorized” and you pushed through. And what’s the result? Everyone gets to be okay except you.
How many of you are brave enough to go through all this in the name of justice? Justice for whom?
The fact that we are both anonymous members of a message board and there’s no evidence that we actually know who each other is, that you don’t know where I live, or where I lived five years ago, or what I look like, or what my sex or gender or age is
The fact that you made the accusation in a thread whose topic is, in part, what constitutes evidence of rape
The fact that the accusation came during a discussion in which you are arguing that someone else’s accusation of rape shouldn’t be believed
Tell me, what does that say about your evidence of rape?
II. E. Jean Carroll writes a book in which she describes an incident in which she was raped by Donald Trump
What’s some of the evidence?
Carroll and Trump were both prominent residents of New York during the approximate time in which she said the rape happened
Carroll is a well-known author, journalist, and public persona who is well known to speak candidly about her life. She is not known to have a track record of dishonesty
Carroll’s account is frank and candid
Carroll’s description of Trump’s behavior matches other people’s stories of Trump’s personality and behavior
More than 20 other women have accused Trump of sexual assault in incidents that have spanned several decades
Trump’s ex-wife filed a paper in court under oath that included an account of Trump sexually assaulting her
Numerous people have witnessed Trump taking liberties with the women around him
There is video audio tape of Trump boasting to someone else that he routinely sexually assaults women
Trump is known to be a serial liar, both in his personal life, his business dealings, and his public life
That’s a good point. I addressed it earlier, very briefly. Perhaps here I suffer from the confirmation bias that I earlier suggested others had.
The idea that it is true and that she doesn’t want justice, but just wants to sell books is not something I want to believe. That would be worse than lying, imo. It is just do ethically icky and repugnant that I really don’t think she would do it.
It’s like this (I think.). If you are Karate master you don’t run around beating people up, even if the desire to do so was why you got into it. That’s because becoming a karate master changes you through it’s process.
I think trauma does something similar. For example, as a teenager, I was a burn victim. It was pretty bad, but really nobody’s fault. The long term agony and consequences of that incident carved themselves deeply into me. The idea that I could save that and wait to cash in or use it as some kind of Trump card is unthinkable and icky. It’s not something a lot of other people are going to get or understand unless they have been unlucky enough to have something similar have happened to them. To seek personal gain from such an experience is unthinkable to me.
I imagine that it must be similar a rape victim. I don’t think they would want something from what happened to them or consider themselves privileged or special.
So, while I am skeptical of her story, and am willing to say so, I am not willing to suggest that she is that horrible.