IN THE E. JEAN CARROLL CASE, DON'T ASSUME THAT TRUMP IS CERTAIN TO LOSE

(I got this one wrong, I'm happy to say. And my apologies to Yas and Tom for confusing their work.)

I have great respect for Yastreblyansky's Tom's judgment (sorry, it was Tom's post; I have great respect for his judgment too), but I'm afraid I don't agree with what he wrote last week about Donald Trump's civil trial:

So apparently Trump's lawyers won't be presenting any witnesses in his defamation trial, I guess just relying on the spectacularly ineffective cross-examination of E. Jean Carroll to make their case. Maybe the plan is to get the verdict overturned on appeal, on the basis of incompetent counsel? I mean, there must be a plan, right?

The jury, Michelle Goldberg noted last week, is six men and three women. To me that's a bad sign. (I know men. That means the ratio of male speech to female speech in the jury room will be much more than two to one.)

It's possible that Yastreblyansky Tom is right and Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina is doing a terrible job, but part of his questioning of E. Jean Carroll, as described in a May 1 blog post at New York magazine, could be persuasive to any juror who thinks Carroll undertook this strictly for vengeance, or at least believes that's possible:

“As you sit here today, you know there’s a Law and Order episode from 2012 that featured a woman getting raped in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, correct?” [Tacopina] asked. Carroll replied, “I am aware, yes.” Carroll, for her part, said she didn’t see the episode, which involves a rape fantasy. Carroll liked Law and Order, but not Special Victims Unit, saying: “It’s too violent.”

Tacopina also asked questions about Carroll’s television and social media habits. He asked about The Apprentice.... Did Carroll admit that she enjoyed the show? “I had never seen such a witty competition on television,” Carroll said. “It was something that was worth watching.”

He then asked about the show’s conclusion — where Trump would tell hapless contestants “You’re fired!” before booting them. “I didn’t watch that,” Carroll said, “but I watched the competition.” Tacopina pressed on “You made a Facebook post, you were a ‘massive’ — all caps Apprentice fan.”

“Two friends were on The Apprentice,” Carroll said, “and I wanted to boost The Apprentice. This was a very good television show.”

Tacopina also asked about another Facebook post where Carroll wrote: “Would you have sex with Donald Trump for $17,000? (Even if you could A. Give the money to charity and B. close your eyes and he’s not allowed to speak.)”

“You joked about having sex with Donald Trump?”

“Yes,” Carroll replied.

In today's New York Times liveblog of the case, Kate Christobek writes this about the closing argument by E. Jean Carroll's lawyer, Michael Ferrara:

Ferrara says [the] defense wants jurors to envision “the perfect rape victim,” one who never goes back to where she was raped, burns whatever clothes she was wearing, never again has success in her career, never looks at her rapist again, never flirts and screams when being assaulted.

If you read this blog, I assume you're a feminist, and you're nodding your head in vigorous agreement with Ferrara. The problem is, it's likely that many of the jurors -- most of the men and quite possibly one or more of the women -- aren't feminists. They are expecting the perfect rape victim. Tacopina may have given them all the permission they think they need to let Trump off the hook.

Goldberg's column has more:

[Tacopina] took a similar tack with Jessica Leeds, one of the two supporting witnesses who also allege Trump assaulted them. Leeds testified that Trump groped her on a plane in the late 1970s, saying, “It’s like he had 40 zillion hands, and it was a tussling match between the two of us.” She said Trump called her the C-word when they ran into each other years later, a degrading little coda. In court, Tacopina questioned Leeds about her politics — “You just testified you are a registered Democrat?” — and her long silence about what she says Trump did to her. “You held it in for those 40 years until he was running for president?” he asked, his tone thick with incredulity.

Goldberg adds:

In the story Tacopina is constructing, all these women are acting out of spite. But the miserable process they’re enduring belies this narrative; it’s hard to imagine any of them, let alone all of them, agreeing to submit to public humiliation, and the attendant threats from Trump’s acolytes, just so they can perjure themselves in the vain hope of tarnishing the ex-president’s political career.

But too many people don't understand that. They imagine that a woman would subject herself to this amount of abuse and vilification just to punish an innocent man, because, y'know, a lot of women are sick and crazy. That was the message of Johnny Depp supporters all through his lawsuit against Amber Heard. And the jury agreed with the fans.

I hope Yastreblyansky Tom is right about this case, even if, as he concedes Yastreblyansky says, it's unlikely to have much impact on the public's view of Trump. But I fear most people still believe too many myths about sexual assault -- particularly the widespread myth that it's a response to sexual frustration, which means that anyone who has a lot of consensual sex couldn't possibly be a criminal sexual aggressor. Maybe the jurors will conclude that Trump is a monster the way juries have concluded that Harvey Weinstein is a monster. But the public never saw Weinstein with a loving wife or girlfriend on his arm. With Trump, they've seen that. So he might skate.