Monday, April 24, 2023

What a way to start

Donald Trump lost his second attempt to block a People magazine writer from testifying that he groped her, bolstering E. Jean Carroll’s allegations that the former president is a serial sexual abuser.

  Law and Crime
That and his infamous "when you're a star they let you do anything" are going to hang him up.
“Ask E. Jean” columnist will begin making her case to a jury that Trump raped her inside the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. Carroll’s case will rely in part on testimony from two other women who allege that Trump behaved in sexually inappropriate ways with them, too, roughly 25 years apart.

Like Carroll, one of those women, Natasha Stoynoff, is a professional scribe who claims that Trump unexpectedly cornered and groped her long before his presidency.

In 2005, Stoynoff says, she went to Mar-a-Lago to interview the then-real estate mogul and his wife Melania Trump for People magazine. She says Donald Trump offered to show her a painting hanging in one of the rooms and then shut the door.

“I turn around and he’s right here, and he grabs my shoulders and pushes me against this wall and starts kissing me,” Stoynoff testified.
I have a theory. We know he sees the world through Hollywood casting eyes. I think he grew up watching movies where men manhandled women, and the women gave in to them after a half-assed pretense at putting up a fight. I think that's a male fantasy, and Trump sees himself as the rugged, sexy, rough male lead in his own movie.  Also, Trump is a misogynist.
Stoynoff said that she was in “complete shock” and pushed back at Trump, twice. She says she unpinned herself after a butler walked into the room. She kept silent on the alleged incident until a little more than a decade later when she went public in a People magazine feature: “Physically attacked by Donald Trump.”

[...]

As the trial approaches, Trump has tried — and failed — in multiple attempts to overturn unfavorable pretrial rulings. The former president unsuccessfully tried to delay the trial date multiple times, and he fought repeatedly against the judge’s determination that the jury should be anonymous. Jury selection begins on Tuesday.
Buckle in.

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