what fact about our current world would freak people out if it were a newspaper headline a century ago?

Phen@lemmy.eco.br to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 182 points –

Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.

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Thanks for saying this. I bet most americans dont know that a convicted rapist was their president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/

I'm not an expert on the nuance of the US legal system, but "convicted" probably applies to the criminal system, right? What would it be in this scenario? A confirmed rapist? Just "a rapist"?

Still, the guy raped some lady and he's actively running for president. That one would be shocking any time before the mid 2010s, honestly.

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Yeah, “civilly liable rapist” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

Civil was the case that they gave me

What’s my motha-fuckin name? “Civil Suit Loserrrrr”

They know . A huge chunk just doesn’t care.

I have family in the US (who are not trumpets afaik) and they wouldn’t know that he actually got proven guilty for doing it. They‘d probably assume he made a deal.

Isn’t it a civil trial tho and not a criminal trial? Meaning that the bar for evidence is just “more than likely” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt” right? I mean it’s still very damning but he has not (yet) been found guilty of the crime, just liable.

There is an important distinction of being "convicted" and "proven guilty" though. You can get off a conviction through multiple means, one being a mistrial and so on. I think there is no two ways about this after reading:

A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.

Was there a criminal trial, that ended in one of these other ways?