Details, Details, Details

Less than 24 hours since @EJeanCarroll's win, Trump posted nearly a dozen times about it on Truth Social. Three of those posts are videos. Five are all-caps screeds. They’re filled with spin, lies and whoppers.

My fact-check and accounting, @LawCrimeNews https://t.co/nZAPTrFc3Y

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 10, 2023

Even assuming, as Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina argued to a jury, Trump’s encounter with Carroll at the photographed event was fleeting, unremarkable, and not memorable, the former president’s insistence that he doesn’t know Carroll still strains credulity. Certainly, Trump knows her now, and there’s public evidence to suggest he would have recognized her then.

A longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, Carroll briefly had a program on the short-lived network America’s Talking, whose president was Trump’s friend Roger Ailes. As the jury learned, Ailes chatted with Trump on that network, and if Trump watched his own interview, he likely would have seen the show before it: “Ask E. Jean.” Carroll testified that Trump recognized her when she left the Bergdorf Goodman back in the mid-1990s.

“Hey, you’re that advice lady,” Trump said, according to Carroll.

And there it is.  That's what the jury heard. Did Trump deny knowing her in his deposition? If he did, that portion wasn't played for the jury.  The jury heard Jean Carroll's testimony.  Trump could have testified and refuted her statements, and then the jury could have decided who to believe.  But Trump didn't do that; and he can't complain now that the jury didn't find his facts over hers, when he presented no facts.  None.  Zero.  Not a one.

From the start, Trump’s denials of Carroll’s allegations gave no inch: As Trump told it, he didn’t know Carroll; she wasn’t his type; and he rarely if ever even entered Bergdorf Goodman. The trial made all three of those propositions difficult to swallow. On the last point, Trump apparently had been such a memorable presence at Bergdorf that two of the store’s former executives testified that they saw him there. He lived across the street from the store.

But how did the jury know that?  Tacopina's arguments are not testimony.  His questions of Carroll are not testimony.  If those statements got in on the video played by the plaintiff, those answers would have included questions by the plaintiff challenging Trump's recollections and statements.  If they didn't come in that way, they didn't come in at all.  The whole concept of a trial is that the evidence is only what is presented to the jury.  Whatever Trump might have said elsewhere was left outside the courtroom as surely as Trump was at his arraignment in Manhattan when the door slammed in his face.

“This Clinton appointed Judge, Lewis Kaplan, hated President Donald J. Trump more than is humanly possible,” Trump wrote. “He is a terrible person, completely biased, and should have RECUSED himself when asked to do so. He quickly refused!”

Yeah, that didn't even happen:

Though much of his statement here is an opinion, Trump makes a factually false claim: Neither of the dockets in Carroll’s lawsuits shows a motion to recuse, and one doesn’t appear to have been adjudicated. The former president may have mistaken the nonexistent recusal request with Tacopina’s failed bid for a mistrial, which described some of Kaplan’s rulings as “unfair.”

If Trump had been in the courtroom, he might have known some of this.

“The ‘Dress,’ which played such a big roll [sic] early on as a threatening bluff, but which ended up being totally exculpatory, was not allowed into the trial as evidence,” Trump wrote, referring to Carroll’s original quest to obtain his DNA. “Nor was her cat’s name, ‘Vagina,’ the racist name she called her Black husband, ‘Ape,’ getting caught in a lie on the political operative paying for this Hoax, & much more!”

Still wondering what the cat's name has to do with anything.  I must admit I've considered naming one or two of the cats I've owned "Asshole."  Now that I think of it, I'd guess Carroll was playing on "Pussy." I still can't see what it has to do with anything in this trial.

In this post, Trump is generally talking about evidence Judge Kaplan barred from trial. Carroll initially sought Trump’s genetic material to compare it with any residue found on the dress. Trump resisted that request for years, and once he hired Tacopina, he made a sudden about-face on the eve of trial. He suddenly offered to provide his DNA, if Carroll would provide missing pages from a genetic report his defense team wanted.

Evidentiary disputes are governed by legal obligations, not bartering, and Judge Kaplan rejected Trump’s request as a “quid pro quo.” Carroll’s legal team called Trump’s 11th-hour reversal a delay tactic to postpone the trial, and the judge ultimately agreed.

On Carroll’s colorful pet name — and the incendiary term she once used for her ex-husband — it’s hard to imagine how that information would have helped a jury determine whether Trump sexually abused her in the mid-1990s. And the judge found those topics irrelevant. Carroll testified about her tumultuous marriage to Johnson, a Black TV news anchor. She was candid about her racially loaded insult toward Johnson in “What Do We Need Men For,” the same book in which she first revealed her allegations against Trump. The judge left out the remark as too inflammatory to put before a diverse New York-based jury.

If discrediting a witness for a racially inflammatory comment were generally permitted in court, Trump — who began his 2016 campaign by suggesting Mexicans are “rapists,” used a slur to describe Japanese people, and has spoken broadly about laziness in “the Blacks” — probably wouldn’t be the beneficiary of such a rule.

He is the beneficiary of CNN, though:

After listening to the Anderson Cooper tape of the Carroll interview where she said ‘rape is sexy,’ and other totally incriminating things, it is not possible to believe that this woman, who I do not know and have never met before (except on a crowded celebrity photo line), could be credible or convincing to a Judge & Jury,” Trump wrote.

Yeah; not what she said:

“I think most people think rape is sexy,” Carroll said, referring to people’s “fantasies.”

And, again, evidence at trial is all that counts:

Carroll elaborated at trial that she was referring to the commodification of rape in shows like “Game of Thrones” and movies like “The Fountainhead.” 

Yeah; details matter.  So does testimony in court, when you are the defendant in a jury trial.  Trump whiffed on his chance to make his case.  He can't complain about the results now.  Well, he can; but we don't have to listen to him.

He's a loser.