Unless you are completely oblivious to national news, you may have heard that former President Donald Trump is currently on trial in civil court for sexual assault and defamation. E. Jean Carroll accuses Trump of raping her in New York City’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995 or 1996. He has denied the event and these denials form the basis of the defamation claim. I wasn’t there and I have no particular insight on the truth of the charges, but I am really perplexed about the decisions that Trump has made in how the case is being tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Donald Trump is running for President (again — how I wish he wouldn’t). With any other candidate you would think that the prospect of being found by a jury to have raped someone would be an existential threat that would call for the most vigorous defense. Yet, although Trump has denied the accusation in various public statements, he is not going to testify at the trial to deny it under oath. Moreover, his attorney announced yesterday that when the plaintiff rests, he is not going to present a defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
True, he’s not going to jail over this, and he has a hard core of followers for whom it would not be disqualifying even if he admitted to the assault, but if he really didn’t do it, why not tell the jury so? It makes one wonder if the denial would be perjury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jay Bohn<\/p>\n\n\n\n
May 4, 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unless you are completely oblivious to national news, you may have heard that former President Donald Trump is currently on trial in civil court for sexual assault and defamation. E. Jean Carroll accuses Trump of raping her in New York City’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995 or 1996. He has denied the event and these denials form … Continue reading “Trump’s Decision Not to Testify in Civil Rape Trial Perplexing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1087"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}