Trump Lawyer Channels Client In Gross Cross Examination Of E. Jean Carroll

FILTHY FILTHY FILTHY.

If the year were 1950, Donald Trump's lawyers would have delivered a stunningly effective cross examination of E. Jean Carroll in her civil suit against him for sexual battery and defamation. The bullying, the sneering, the slut shaming — Trump attorney Joseph Tacopina brought it all yesterday. 

“Tacopina: Your purse was still in your hand? Carroll: Yes. Tacopina: What kind of purse was it? Carroll: A leather stand-up. Tacopina: You never hit him with your purse? Carroll: I believe I did. Tacopina: When did you remember that? Carroll: Always.”

— Inner City Press (@Inner City Press) 1682621670 

But the year is 2023, and this performance was by any objective standard disgusting and rooted in outdated beliefs about trauma and consent.

It started with Tacopina running a weird dominance play on the witness.

“Good morning, Ms. Carroll," he began.

When Carroll, who had no doubt been instructed only to answer in response to a question, stayed silent, he repeated louder, “Good morning, Ms. Carroll!”

To which she reluctantly responded, “Good morning.”

This was followed by hours of questioning straight out of a movie about the bad old days.

 Did you really fight back? Did you fight back hard enough? Why weren't you more traumatized? Why didn't you cry? Why didn't you hit him harder? Why didn't you report it to the police? Why did you wait so long to speak up? Why are there minor inconsistencies in your account? 

And of course, that oldest of chestnuts,  Why didn't you scream?  

That last provoked a furious outburst from Carroll.   

  "You can’t beat up on me for not screaming," she responded to Tacopina's badgering.

And then when he suggested that she hadn't come up with a story about screaming until she spoke to her psychiatrist:

I wasn’t coming up with a story. It’s usually — I would say more than usually — under discussion when a woman is raped and she doesn’t scream. It’s usually discussed, why didn’t she scream, E. Jean? Why didn’t you scream? It’s what a woman — you better have a good excuse why you didn’t scream. Because if you didn’t scream, you weren’t raped. I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not.

Trump has two female lawyers on his team: Susan Necheles and Alina Habba. The strategy of having Tacopina, a physically imposing man in his 50s, depose a slight woman in her 70s about a sexual assault was frankly bizarre, and leads to speculation that the decision was made by one particular man in his late 70s with gross, outmoded ideas about sex and violence.

Tacopina was similarly dismissive of Carroll's explanation that the she finally came forward after all these years because of the #MeToo movement, suggesting that she was simply lying in an effort to sell her book.

“Tacopina: This was a book you desperately wanted to sell, right? Carroll: Yes, I wanted to sell the book I was writing. Tacopina: And naming Donald Trump was a major element of selling your book, right? Carroll: I though it would attract people. I was wrong.”

— Inner City Press (@Inner City Press) 1682611449 

But Carroll was not put off.

Speaking about watching Harvey Weinstein finally get taken down, she described a familiar sensation to so many women who did not scream .

When that happened, across the country women began telling their stories, and I was flummoxed. Wait a minute, can we actually speak up and not be pummeled? I thought, well this may be a way to change the culture of sexual violence. The light dawned. I thought, we can actually change things if we all tell our stories. And I thought by god, this may be the time.

It caused me to realize that staying silent does not work. It doesn’t work. If women speak up, we have a chance of limiting the harm that happens.

And for those of us who felt something inside us rip when Trump got elected just weeks after bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy," who felt our internal seams bursting when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, who knew exactly what Carroll meant when she said "Laughing is a very good — I use the word weapon — to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention," the floor gave way a little.

We will find out soon if Tacopina's display also had that effect on the jury. But before then, a whole lot more ugliness is virtually guaranteed.

[ Politico / Law & Crime / Daily Beast ]

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