Former President Donald Trump on Saturday stood by his 2019 statement that writer E. Jean Carroll made a “totally false accusation” against him, despite similar claims resulting in him losing a defamation case in January.
Campaigning at a rally in Rome, Georgia, Trump referenced the $91.6 million bond he posted on March 8, three days before his deadline to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for defaming her in statements he made as president after denying her accusation that he’d raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Carroll first came forward in 2019 with sexual assault claims against Trump before another civil trial in May 2023, where a New York jury found that the former president sexually abused Carroll but didn’t rape her.
Juries never find you innocent of anything. They find you not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a big difference.
Anyone who claims that a court found them innocent is lying.
Fine, but they also did not find him “not guilty” of rape because he wasn’t charged with rape. He was sued for making defamatory statements, and the jury found that he had forcibly penetrated her with his fingers and then claimed he didn’t.
That is rape. In New York, it would not be enough to convict him of rape, but he wasn’t on trial for rape so the New York State legal definition is irrelevant. He was not found “not guilty” of rape.
Maybe, but the judge also clarified that he would be guilty of rape had the statute of limitations not run out.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/a-federal-judge-has-gone-to-great-lengths-to-make-clear-trump-really-did-rape-e-jean-carroll/
The judge said exactly what I said. He did not say that Trump would be guilty of rape, he said that Trump raped Carroll. There’s a difference.
The linked article says nothing about this. Do you have a different source? I’m really doubtful that the judge would say something this presumptuous about criminal liability, especially predicting guilt against a real defendant in a trial that has not happened.
This was a civil case, not a criminal case. They were deciding liability not guilt.
And no one is innocent if you count original sin. Boom!
BTW, ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’ is the determinative threshold for criminal litigation. It’s less strict for civil.