Observations On The Trump Defamation and Rape Civil Trial Verdict [Updated]

Former President Donald Trump has been found liable in the rape and defamation civil suit brought by Jean E. Carroll’s civil suit, and Carroll is to be awarded a total of $5 million in damages. This was not a criminal case, because the statute of limitations for rape had run: the alleged sexual assault occurred in 1995 or 1996.

A federal jury of six men and three women found that Carroll, now 79, had proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find that Trump raped her, as she claims.

But because the former President on his Truth Social platform called her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” the jury also found that he had defamed the plaintiff. His lawyer said he would appeal; no witnesses were called on behalf of Trump’s defense.

The ex-President’s reaction was characteristic:

Ethics observations:

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”

There are strong indications that the race-hucksters are revving up to make Jordan Neely the next George Floyd in time to re-charge the batteries of racial distrust in time for the 2024 Presidential campaign, so further attention must be paid. This is true, unfortunately, before the investigation of the tragic incident has been completed. The Federalist warns that the death of the black homeless man at the hands of a white former Marine attempting to protect fellow passengers is being primed for exploitation:

Penny’s fate will, as Peachy Keenan wrote in The Federalist, be a test of whether young American men should dare to act courageously when others are in peril. But there’s even more at stake in this case. With Neely being anointed as the new George Floyd, the questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism. Floyd’s death became a metaphor for a myth about systemic police racism. Floyd’s actions the night of his death, his criminal record, and the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that he was a black man and that the cop who had, in an act of undoubted callous brutality, snuffed out his life was white. In the name of a belief, however mistaken, that Floyd’s death was just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity, millions took to the streets in “mostly peaceful” riots that shook the nation.

More than that, it set off a moral panic in virtually every sector of American life that elevated the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new secular religion — since accepted by the Biden administration as mandatory for every government agency and department — that treats color-blind policies and even the goal of equal opportunity as forms of racism that must be eradicated.

Read the whole thing…but first read Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the related Ethics Alarms post, “Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely”:

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“It is true that Penny could not have known that history when he intervened; it is also relevant information now.”

I don’t know that this is right… There’s evidence that Neely was kind of known in the subway community – You ride the same car to and from work five days a week, 200 days a year, and you’ll probably eventually start to recognize a face or two, and the face of the lunatic getting violent, perhaps one famous for cracking the orbital bone of a 67 year old woman or trying to kidnap a 7 year old girl might be a face to remember. Penny might not have known about all 44 arrests, but I don’t think it’s impossible that he knew the guy was a violent problem.

This case is… sad. I don’t know that this is Neely’s fault, so much as I’m pretty convinced that fault, if we have to look at it that way, doesn’t lie with Penny. Neely was failed so many different ways – When it comes to mental health, you just cannot expect people to reason themselves to sanity. For the people that are able to, that great. For the people who think the oven is their shoe rack, their pristine house is covered in bugs, that their arm is not their arm, that their 80 pound frame is too fat, or whatever psychosis brings on to Neely’s position, there needs to be people in your life that care enough to help.

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Ethics And The Death Of Jordan Neely

You know the story by now, presumably. A week ago, Jordan Neely, a homeless and mentally ill black man, was shouting at passengers riding with him in the subway. He was apparent getting in passengers’ faces and causing significant anxiety. A 24-year-old former Marine, Daniel Penny, decided that it was his civic duty to intervene, especially since there were no law enforcement authorities in the car. He tackled and restrained Neely (apparently some other riders assisted), put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became unconscious. Neely was later pronounced dead at a hospital. New York City’s medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression of the neck and classified the death as a homicide, which does not automatically mean it was a crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office is investigating. So far, Penny has not been charged.

It is Penny’s misfortune to be white, so the usual race-bating activists and demagogues are framing the episode as “George Floyd II.” Fortunately Neely did not say “I can’t breathe” before passing out.

Ethics Observation #1: The presumed racial animus that was attached to the Floyd case will keep repeating itself in such incidents until it is decisively rejected. As the culture has been conditioned now, whenever a white man is involved in the death of a black man, the motive is presumed to be racism, and the crime a hate crime.

Penny, who was only officially named three days ago, released this statement through his lawyers:

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Ethics Observations On Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter Humiliation

 

Oates, a prolific and much-honored writer as well as a college professor,deleted the tweet after merciless mockery. In case you are, like her, unfamiliar with Marvel Comics tropes, the intergalactic supervillain Thanos wields the Infinity Gauntlet,”one of the most powerful objects in the [Marvel] Universe.” It empowers the wearer to do anything and everything imaginable.

Observations:

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….

The Colorado Education Association (CEA) has approved a resolution produced by the union that states, “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.” A previous draft, apparently edited to avoid being too transparent in revealing the educators’ Marxist agenda, called to replace capitalism with a “new equitable economic system.”

Nice!

But wait…there’s more!

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No, It Is Not “Sexist” To Argue That Senator Feinstein Should Resign

The New York Times editorial board has issued an editorial calling on Senator Diane Feinstein to step down. It is an entirely partisan appeal, but that’s the Times: the editors are worried that her continued absence from active participation and impairment due to advanced age (she’s 89, and obviously declining in health and cognitive acuity) will threaten the progressive agenda. Their position that Feinstein needs to be responsible and retire is no less valid, however. It was irresponsible for her to run for reelection in 2018, and irresponsible for California voters to elect her. Now the aged Senator is unable to vote or attend committee meetings because of her declining health, and there is no indication when that situation will improve.

So of course she should step down. But Democrats gotta Democrat, so Rep. Nancy Pelosi, herself 83 and another abuser of the public official’s duty not to continue in office past her pull-date, has accused the Times and others of “sexism.” You know the formula by now: if anyone criticizes what a Democratic woman does, it’s sexism, just as when anyone criticizes what a black Democrat does, it’s racism. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that the tactic works, and now it is SOP. “‘I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,’ Pelosi said regarding the calls for Feinstein’s resignation.

Sadly, the supposedly rational and independent law prof-blogger Ann Althouse (who had the sense to retire from teaching before she started spiraling into incompetence) has sided with the ex-Speaker. “But isn’t Pelosi right?,” she wrote yesterday. “Something has been done badly by men for a long, long time, and suddenly it just has to stop… because a woman is doing it?”

Ugh. No, Pelosi is NOT right, and Ann’s ethical reasoning is depressing. That’s as pure an “Everybody does it” rationalization as you are ever going to see. Male Senators were foolishly allowed to continue in office when they were incapacitated (Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, absent for four years with heart problems and Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, unable to do his job for three years after a stroke) or outrageously old (Strom Thurmond, who served into his 100th year and had probably been senile for years), so Ann concludes that the ethical approach now is for Senators to keep on being irresponsible because that’s the way it’s always been done, even though the practice impedes the operation of the government?

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If You Need Additional Evidence That Paying Attention To Celebrities’ Political Posturing Is Evidence of Crippling Gullibility—And You Shouldn’t—Here It Is

That’s Kim Kardashian above, the perfect embodiment of empty celebrity. She was one of many “glitterati” who attended the 2023 Met Gala on May 1, and willingly participated in the theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” The whole event was billed as a tribute to the late fashion icon one of the all-time great designers, who was also indisputably a terrible person, at least according to the public pronouncements and signaled values of Hollywood’s, New York’s, cosmopolitan and the fashion world’s stars.

Piers Morgan, who, like a stopped clock, occasionally is spot-on accurate, was outraged by the event’s hypocrisy, writing,

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Not Unethical, Just Narcissistic And Stupid, But Criticism Goes With The Territory

31-year-old Theresia Fischer, who starred on Germany’s “Celebrity Big Brother,” has paid $160,000 for two painful surgeries that added five and a half inches to each leg. Now she is six feet tall in her stocking feet, six-four in those platforms.

The doctors inserted adjustable telescopic rods into her tibiae. I believe that this is a violation of medical ethics, as she had no actual malady that required medical intervention, and the procedure involved risk, as all medical procedures do. However, cosmetic surgeons tend to be live on the bottom of the ethics barrel.

In her publicity campaign celebrating being turned into a freak, she extols what the operation has done for her sex life, but also complains that she has been the target of “hate” on the web, where she is well-followed on TikTok and Instagram. “Why am I subject to so much hate?” she lamented to the New York Post.

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