The lawsuit accusing Trump of raping a 13-year-old girl, explained

Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 849 points – The lawsuit accusing Trump of raping a 13-year-old girl, explained
vox.com

Johnson claimed that Trump violently raped her when she was 13 at a 1994 orgy hosted by Jeffrey Epstein — the billionaire who was convicted in 2008 of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution and has been accused of having sex with more than 30 underage girls.

Johnson said Trump had sexual contact with her at four of those parties, including tying her to a bed and violently raping her in a “savage sexual attack.” The lawsuit said Johnson “loudly pleaded” with Trump to stop, but that he responded by “violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted.”

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Why isn't this all over prime time news, including fox, so the christian voters can see it.

More importantly why aren't the democrats and liberal establishment forcing this into the public eye. They could be using this to their advantage. Why aren't we hearing about it as loudly as we should be. I'm not seeing it any where mainstream.

Fuck, biden should give a press announcement only for this.

(1) trillionaires (such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk) bought out the media - "prime time news" no longer exists, as it used to, now instead we have advertising segments meant to increase profitz

(2) the christians do not care - as evidenced by the fact that they already know. They just used him to accomplish their ends, of restricting abortion and whatever. Authoritarians just don't think in terms like right or wrong, and rather what am I told to feel about this or that?

(3) also, yes they are THAT MUCH against the LGBTQIA+ "agenda" (of living life free from outside interference) that they could have watched the event happen live, heard her screams, and still vote for Trump. Some would still vote that way even if he had done it personally to them. It is an entirely different mindset, and we would do well to listen to it, rather than be surprised a few months from now (as we were before in 2016).

(4) if you want to understand it moar better-er, the best teacher I've seen is The Alt Right Playbook, by Innuendo Studios - I recommend starting at the beginning and going all the way through it, but the most relevant one to this discussion I think is this one.

TLDR: they know, they don't care in the slightest - truly.

It boils down to this: To the GOP the idea that a LGBT person might molest a child is more important than the reality that Trump actually has.

No need to hyperbolic with the use of trillionaires there.

Billionaires, 0.1%, ultra wealthy or any other term would have sufficed.

Thank you for the correction - it is Amazon that has 2 trillion and Tesla 1 trillion, but Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk themselves each have only ~0.2 trillion, so billionaires not trillionaires indeed. My words would carry more weight if I were more careful slinging them around:-).

Ya, it's Amazon that's 2T. Tesla is currently 785b after its latest delivery report, but did make it into the 1T club at its peak.

I love the Alt-Right Playbook series. It's so well done, but definitely not something I'd expect any Republican voter to understand, yet alone watch.

It is not meant for, nor aimed at, them. Rather it is to help liberals become woken up to the fact that conservatives aren't merely temporarily displaced liberals themselves, who simply need a slight course correction and then they'll be eternally grateful for being shown to be wrong (as we would in reverse), but rather how they think fundamentally, foundationally, in an entirely different manner.

And everything gets filtered by that worldview. Hence, even someone who was personally raped by Trump himself may still vote for him, believing not in "him" but in how he can be strategically useful to their cause of returning America to a state that never existed for us where an emperor can do whatever he wants, and somehow that's what will make us great (again?). Just like how Russia is "great" and "strong" now - you know, in spite of literally all of the evidence to the contrary.

But lest my message get lost here: Innuendo Studios isn't poking fun of conservatives for ignoring literally all of the facts that contradict their worldview and instead believing in their fantasical magical wonderland - rather, it helps liberals realize that we are the ones who are ignoring literally all of the facts that contradict our worldview and instead believing in our fantasical magical wonderland, e.g. where Bernie Sanders had some kind of a ghost of a chance at winning despite bucking the system of powerful elites, or that Hillary would win so easily that she didn't even need to bother campaigning in the Midwestern states (beyond bringing hot sauce in her purse), or that people are so scared of Trump that Biden is a shoe-in despite not having earned people's votes or being able to finish a sentence. We will receive our rude awakening, once again, and as always we will blame not enough people for voting or whatever tidbit lies easily within reach - anything rather than own up to the fact that irl reality is hard, and might involve some actual effort to understand, both others, and most especially ourselves.

You know that little boy near the end of Sixth Sense whispering "I see dead people, walking around like regular people - they don't know they're dead!"? Imagine instead that he said "we are the same, conservatives and liberals - other-group-person=bad but same-group-person=good, ignoring any inconvenient facts to the contrary". This is why we're fucked up the ass, and so easily led like sheep by the billionaires - bc we refuse to learn, from either failures or success, and instead merely tell stories to convince ourselves of the rightness of our respective causes, since we enjoy those calm stories more than the harshness and complexity of reality.

It doesn't help that the same billionaires have spent decades dumbing down education and making higher education prohibitively expensive. All while cramming every single wedge issues under the sun into the national narrative to further entrench this tribal mentality. I know all of what you say is true, but it seems all but impossible to combat at this point.

It's so hard to have any motivation to carry on in this world given a portion of it is fine with all manner of atrocities so long as "their guy" is "winning." Why try to make anything better -- be it more just, equal, enjoyable for all -- when a good portion of the country (possibly the world) is so hell-bent on making it worse because they dislike a small subset of some insignificant problem?

Yesterday was the 4th. I just don't know why anyone celebrated at all. What's there to celebrate at this point when some will sell out their future, and the future of their own, for a "red hat?"

It does help though... it helps them. And that's an important distinction that we would do well to recognize.

When a lion wants to eat you, b/c it is hungry or maybe it just wants to fatally bat you around for fun, it is not the lion's job to not eat you - it is our job to not allow it to do so, or at least make our best attempt.

I am also not certain that this fight can be "won". It most certainly can/will not if we do not even try.

Even so, there is value in learning things. Whatever comes after America will be rough, and it behooves us to wake the fuck up and face that rather than go back to sleep.

More to the point, it is more fun to live life awake and facing forward, than to have to constantly anticipate bad things that are inevitably coming but we have no idea when or how or what precisely it will look like. Maybe it won't even be all that bad? But we'll only know that if we look at it with our eyes.

But back to the fun aspect: why be Sisyphus, constantly struggling against things that we have no control over, when we can focus our attention on the things we can control? We cannot control "them" - we never will be able to control "them" - so why worry about it? That seems counterproductive. Instead, focus on what we can control, and the motivation returns. There is no spoon. No, seriously, there isn't: we could only ever control ourselves, that's it and that's all that was ever possible, anywhere, at any time.

Another neat thing: when the USA broke away from England, it spawned an entire rash of similar actions in other colonies that gave the middle finger to the English kings, and other nations likewise ditched their own kings of their respective colonial empires as well (e.g. France). We inspired the entire fucking world. As Rome did before us. Even after we fall, nobody is taking that legacy away - it will live on for thousands of years when all of us have long since died, of causes natural and/or otherwise.

Moreover, they have updated to Democracy 2.0, while we remained mired in our 1.0 version, and really having downgraded even from that by allowing devolution into a 2-party system that brought us to this point. Maybe after a time we can import some of those newer democratic systems back in, if fascism replaces democracy and then democracy replaces that fascism, and we can have a bright shiny Democracy 3.0 then. Though one thing is for certain: Democracy 1.0 has already failed - not will fail in some future sense, but already. Either that or we can at least not be blamed overmuch for thinking thus, given how fatally we seem to be wounded lately.

Focus on what you can control. There is no spoon - only ourselves.

There is a whole group of religious folks that are certain he is the antichrist and want to bring him to power so he can bring about the end of days, revelations, the rapture (where they will be saved), then after hell on earth, the 1000 years of peace....so....they are totally cool with his evil. It's insane when you think about it from the position of nothing in religion being real.

I dont doubt it one bit. These people belong in mental institutions. Yet they're allowed (encouraged?) to vote, as well as raise (indoctrinate) children into their ridiculous way of thinking.

I was one of those children. It's a crazy life, and there are tons of people who live it and believe it.

It should be revealing with a story like this just how controlled the media has actually become. The vast majority of major media outlets have been slowly bought out and/or heavily funded by right-wing groups. The story should be everywhere, but you'll probably only see it in niche news sites and maybe MSNBC. This is also why all we really see are negative stories about Biden regardless of what Trump does or says.

The article describes why the story feels to them so strange and suspicious. For example

It was the end of an incredibly strange case that featured an anonymous plaintiff who had refused almost all requests for interviews, two anonymous corroborating witnesses whom no one in the press had spoken to, and a couple of seriously shady characters — with an anti-Trump agenda and a penchant for drama — who had aggressively shopped the story around to media outlets for over a year.

Those shady characters — a former reality TV producer who calls himself “Al Taylor” and a “Never Trump” conservative activist named Steve Baer — had been mostly unsuccessful in getting the media to bite. There are a few very good reasons for that, which the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim succinctly summed up: Taylor and Baer have been really sketchy about the whole thing, and since the accuser is anonymous, journalists can’t do anything to verify her claims. The only journalist who has actually interviewed Johnson, Emily Shugerman at Revelist, came away confused and even doubting whether Johnson really exists.

Since a tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault came out in early October, a dozen named women have come forward with credible, similar-sounding allegations of Trump forcibly kissing or groping them in exactly the way he described on that tape. Johnson’s case was an outlier, with far more salacious allegations from a source that seems far less credible.

And it goes much further. I guess not many wanted to go hard on this story with it seeming a bit sketchy. Like they said in the end

It’s true that the allegation is explosive, andcould make voters see Trump’s many disturbing comments about young girls over the years in a new light. But it’s also very dubious and uncertain, and there’s no real need to promote a case like that when a dozen women have come forward with much more credible stories, using their own names and making themselves available to reporters for scrutiny.

This is why.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/01/04/new-epstein-documents-unsealed-bill-clinton-threatened-vanity-fair-over-sex-trafficking-coverage-email-alleges/

It's not just Bill Clinton though. Many of the rich and powerful are vulnerable to the Epstein story, including Bill Gates.

That's a bingo.

They don't want to shed light on it because it could implicate way more than just trump.

The media itself is a fucking mess.

Take this, for example:

So a self-affirmed victim sends an email to a magazine. That email becomes a point of fact even though people involved either never confirmed it or straight up said it never happened.

This happens constantly. "News" is getting reported before or without confirmation. Shoot first, ask questions later, maybe put a blurb at the bottom a couple weeks later when nobody will read it correcting everything that was wrong.

Obviously the Clinton's wouldn't confirm it, but they've long since learned not to deny it either. Denying is nearly as bad as confirming, since it gives even a little more credibility to the claims, just by acknowledging its existence. Especially in this current political climate, commenting at all has nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Highly recommend the book "Trust me, I'm Lying". News consumers have to do their due diligence now and actually judge the sources of the news itself, even for sources previously thought to be reputable. The court of public opinion is all that matters, and it's judged by old and new media alike. Spez and Musk and Zuck are all as powerful as Murdoch, and they're the Supreme Court of Public Opinion.

And then you have shit like the Internet Research Agency flooding the docket.

Well, as others said, it’s probably because it’s a 2016 article about a story that never got anywhere.

Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, who knows. But it’s definitely not the best thing to give press announcements about, especially considering all the horrible stuff Trump has verifiably done.

I don't think they've read the article, which is a shame because it's an interesting one. But it does make that point and comments about Clinto campaign

But the Clinton campaign hasn’t touched Johnson’s allegation, and with good reason. It’s true that the allegation is explosive, andcould make voters see Trump’s many disturbing comments about young girls over the years in a new light. But it’s also very dubious and uncertain, and there’s no real need to promote a case like that when a dozen women have come forward with much more credible stories, using their own names and making themselves available to reporters for scrutiny.

Jimmy carter sold his peanut farm to be president. Dan Quayle spelled potato wrong and lost the presidency.

But rape allegations are fine, because it might not be true. He's such a trustworthy guy after all.

That’s not the point I’m making. I’m saying between inciting an insurrection, spending campaign funds for silencing pornstars, telling people to inject disinfectant in their veins, and sexual assault sentences… I’d say one shady rape allegation that never went anywhere is definitely not the main reason why he shouldn’t be president.