REMINDER: Kaitlan Collins Once Made Racist Listicle Of Hot Syrian Refugees For Tucker Carlson's Website
But yes please, Beltway journalists, hug her and tell her she did a good job Tuesday night.
Ever since Tuesday night, much of the media discussion has been, correctly, about the journalistically stupid and bankrupt decision the hack suits at CNN made to let Donald Trump have a free hour to spew fascist lies and propaganda, and the shitty, fuckin' lazy job Kaitlan Collins did moderating the "town hall."
And just like clockwork, Beltway hack journalists who lost the plot a long time ago of what journalism is supposed to do surrounded poor Ms. Collins to assure her she had done a wonderful job with the Herculean, perhaps scientifically UNPOSSIBLE job of fact-checking Donald Trump in real time.
You know, as if she was the second coming of Maggie Haberman or something.
An example of the genre:
\u201cProps to @kaitlancollins who was in an impossible position but did a heroic job of fact-checking Trump throughout the town hall. No easy task given how many factually untrue things he said in such a short time. Collins was a true pro and showed what a stellar journalist she is.\u201d— Peter Baker (@Peter Baker) 1683767657
Oh for God's sake.
We'll get back to him in a minute.
But first we want to remind everybody what Kaitlan Collins's job used to be, before she was a VERY SERIOUS CNN JOURNALIST who gets to "moderate" CNN town halls and do a "heroic job of fact-checking Trump throughout."
Let's visit the year 2015, when serious journalist Kaitlan Collins was ... [checks notes] ... writing sexist BuzzFeed-style listicles for the amusement of white nationalist Tucker Carlson, at the white nationalist Daily Caller website he founded.
Like this one, 13 Syrian Refugees We'd Take Immediately.
Note the byline.
Yes, this was when the Syrian refugee crisis was front page news, and this was Collins's and the Daily Caller's response.
The picture links are broken now — and were very soon after publication, perhaps because of the immediate backlash — but it was all Syrian women Ms. Collins wrote were "Syria-sly hot."
Isn't she such a journalist?
Collins was also responsible in 2014 for "Ice Bucket Challenge Hipsters: These Guantanamo Detainees Did It First." Surprise, all the pictures on that one are now missing as well.
In that article, Collins attempted to write jokes:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006 after his 2003 capture in Pakistan. He has been identified by the “9/11 Commission Report” as the “mastermind of the 9/11 plot.” In 2008, CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden publicly boasted that waterboarding had been used on KSM, making him one of the first hipsters to partake in the “Ice Bucket Challenge.” He tops the list because KSM took the challenge a record 183 times.
Conservatives are getting better at humor, etc. Even back in 2014.
So that is the serious person all the hacks in DC are rallying around right now.
Now let's revisit that tweet at the top, where Peter Baker of the New York Times fawned all over what a wonderful job Collins had done with the journalistic feats of strength she had accomplished.
We responded on Twitter. You may click here to read the thread, or we will just reproduce the text below:
\u201cI am so tired of journalists patting each other on the back acting like factchecking Trump is such an impossible task, and that anyone who attempts it is some kind of hero. \n\nHe tells the same lies every time. He has a million of them, but they are always the same. \n\nEXAMPLE!\u201d— Evan Hurst (@Evan Hurst) 1683772623
Text:
I am so tired of journalists patting each other on the back acting like factchecking Trump is such an impossible task, and that anyone who attempts it is some kind of hero. He tells the same lies every time. He has a million of them, but they are always the same. EXAMPLE!
Abortion. Trump has been telling the same disgusting lies about abortion, and about how Democrats let the baby be born and cry on the table while they decide whether to execute it for SEVERAL YEARS NOW. It is not a feat of journalistic strength to be ready for this.
Pick a subject, any subject. There are only so many things you can talk to him about in a one hour town hall. Do a half assed job of research into the lies he tells about those things, and be ready with the facts. I swear to Christ.
If your network is so far up its both sides ass that it thinks it necessary to give an indicted authoritarian fascist serial sexual assaulter free airtime, the least you can do is prepare.
The full timers and freelancers at @Wonkette could pull this off, and there’s like eight of us total. For God’s sake.
Every word of that is true, except for we are too lazy to count up all of the five to 10 people who work at Wonkette to arrive at a precise number.
The mainstream media has not learned a thing in the last eight years — counting from Trump descending the escalator in 2015 and calling Mexicans rapists — and now we get to be subjected to all the media's explainings about how the American people deserve to hear both sides of whether the indicted authoritarian fascist serial sexual assaulter we mentioned (also a compulsive liar) should get to be the next president of the United States. You know, after he incited a terrorist attack against America in the process of trying to overturn the election and overthrow the government.
Because that's what journalism is. Showing both sides. Of all things. Because all things have both sides.
Goddamned fucking hacks.
Give Wonkette money and support us and the others out there who are actually willing to tell you the truth.
Need more inspiration for that?
Listen to this shit from Anderson Cooper last night.
\u201cCooper: You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?\u201d— Acyn (@Acyn) 1683850121
They will never, ever learn.
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
I would like a BlueSky invite.
I'm also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@evanhurst@newsie.social) and at Post!
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Trump Lawyers Try To Limit Damages By Keeping Their Client Far Away From Carroll Jury
Can you get a custodial sentence in a defamation case?
BREAKING: Donald Trump is a filthy coward.
Okay, it's not breaking. But it's rather top of mind today as the attorneys give their closing arguments in the E. Jean Carroll battery and defamation case. For the past two weeks, the former Elle advice columnist has presented witness after witness to corroborate her story. From the friends she told about it immediately; to the two women who were attacked by Trump in similar, public circumstances; to the Bergdorf Goodman's staff who said that Thursday nights were dead in the lingerie department, where the dressing rooms weren't always locked and Trump was a frequent patron; to the expert witness who testified about her trauma.
In contrast, Trump called ... no one. His lawyers named two potential witnesses: Dr. Edgar Nace, to rebut Carroll's trauma claims, and Trump himself. In the event, Dr. Nace noped out, citing illness, while Trump himself never showed. Although he did make idiotic mouth noises last week about coming to “confront this woman” in court, prompting Judge Lewis Kaplan to offer Trump's lawyer Joseph Tacopina the opportunity to make a motion to have his client testify.
\u201cBreaking: Donald Trump rails against rape accuser E Jean Carroll\u2019s \u201cfalse accusations\u201d, and tells us he will \u201cprobably\u201d attend the trial in New York, which he calls a \u201cscam\u201d and a \u201cpolitical attack\u201d - he says he will \u201cconfront\u201d the claims, which he denies #Trump #Doonbeg\u201d— Stephen Murphy (@Stephen Murphy) 1683193988
But the 5 p.m. deadline Sunday for Trump to move to testify came and went with nothing filed. Because of course it did. Trump's lawyers were never going to put him in the same room with the jury — FFS, they tried to get the court to preemptively "excuse" him and tell the jurors that he really wanted to be there, but was staying away out of deference for the needs of the US Marshals and New York cops it would take to protect him. To which the court said HAHA, PISS OFF, or words to that effect.
It was bad enough watching him on tape, caked with orange makeup and agreeing that "fortunately or unfortunately" powerful men have always been able to "grab 'em by the pussy" and get away with it. Even if he didn't testify, having that lunatic snorting and rolling his eyes at the table while Carroll described being sexually assaulted would have added another zero to the damage award.
And so, with no further witnesses, the two sides presented closing arguments today. Several reporters were live tweeting from the courtroom, including Inner City Press's Matthew Russell Lee and Law & Crime's Adam Klasfeld. Carroll's lawyer got the ball rolling by going back over the evidence from the past two weeks of evidence, and playing the deposition tape where Trump mistook a photo of Carroll for his second wife Marla Maples.
“In a real sense, Donald Trump is a witness against himself," she said, later reminding jurors of Trump's gross comments about the "Access Hollywood" tape: “He actually said fortunately? Let that sink in for a moment … he thinks stars like him can get away with it. And he thinks he can get away with it here,” she said.
Tacopina, who bullied the mostly female witnesses on the stand to disastrous effect, continued this strategy in his close.
\u201cTacopina: Ms. Carroll had to reverse engineer her story. Then there's the physical attack she alleges. How does Mr. Trump unzip while she is hitting him with her bag, in four inch heels? So they have a hired gun, Doctor Lebowitz, $650 an hour. She was not credible\u201d— Inner City Press (@Inner City Press) 1683563217
TL, DR? Bitches lie.
Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan returned for a brief rebuttal, and tomorrow the court will issue jury instructions before sending the panel to deliberate. Notably, the plaintiff did not ask for a specific dollar amount.
Fingers crossed that they grab him by the wallet.
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Trump Lawyer Channels Client In Gross Cross Examination Of E. Jean Carroll
FILTHY FILTHY FILTHY.
If the year were 1950, Donald Trump's lawyers would have delivered a stunningly effective cross examination of E. Jean Carroll in her civil suit against him for sexual battery and defamation. The bullying, the sneering, the slut shaming — Trump attorney Joseph Tacopina brought it all yesterday.
\u201cTacopina: Your purse was still in your hand?\nCarroll: Yes.\nTacopina: What kind of purse was it?\nCarroll: A leather stand-up.\nTacopina: You never hit him with your purse?\nCarroll: I believe I did.\nTacopina: When did you remember that?\nCarroll: Always.\u201d— Inner City Press (@Inner City Press) 1682621670
But the year is 2023, and this performance was by any objective standard disgusting and rooted in outdated beliefs about trauma and consent.
It started with Tacopina running a weird dominance play on the witness.
“Good morning, Ms. Carroll," he began.
When Carroll, who had no doubt been instructed only to answer in response to a question, stayed silent, he repeated louder, “Good morning, Ms. Carroll!”
To which she reluctantly responded, “Good morning.”
This was followed by hours of questioning straight out of a movie about the bad old days.
Did you really fight back? Did you fight back hard enough? Why weren't you more traumatized? Why didn't you cry? Why didn't you hit him harder? Why didn't you report it to the police? Why did you wait so long to speak up? Why are there minor inconsistencies in your account?
And of course, that oldest of chestnuts, Why didn't you scream?
That last provoked a furious outburst from Carroll.
"You can’t beat up on me for not screaming," she responded to Tacopina's badgering.
And then when he suggested that she hadn't come up with a story about screaming until she spoke to her psychiatrist:
I wasn’t coming up with a story. It’s usually — I would say more than usually — under discussion when a woman is raped and she doesn’t scream. It’s usually discussed, why didn’t she scream, E. Jean? Why didn’t you scream? It’s what a woman — you better have a good excuse why you didn’t scream. Because if you didn’t scream, you weren’t raped. I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not.
Trump has two female lawyers on his team: Susan Necheles and Alina Habba. The strategy of having Tacopina, a physically imposing man in his 50s, depose a slight woman in her 70s about a sexual assault was frankly bizarre, and leads to speculation that the decision was made by one particular man in his late 70s with gross, outmoded ideas about sex and violence.
Tacopina was similarly dismissive of Carroll's explanation that the she finally came forward after all these years because of the #MeToo movement, suggesting that she was simply lying in an effort to sell her book.
\u201cTacopina: This was a book you desperately wanted to sell, right?\nCarroll: Yes, I wanted to sell the book I was writing.\nTacopina: And naming Donald Trump was a major element of selling your book, right?\nCarroll: I though it would attract people. I was wrong.\u201d— Inner City Press (@Inner City Press) 1682611449
But Carroll was not put off.
Speaking about watching Harvey Weinstein finally get taken down, she described a familiar sensation to so many women who did not scream.
When that happened, across the country women began telling their stories, and I was flummoxed. Wait a minute, can we actually speak up and not be pummeled? I thought, well this may be a way to change the culture of sexual violence. The light dawned. I thought, we can actually change things if we all tell our stories. And I thought by god, this may be the time.
It caused me to realize that staying silent does not work. It doesn’t work. If women speak up, we have a chance of limiting the harm that happens.
And for those of us who felt something inside us rip when Trump got elected just weeks after bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy," who felt our internal seams bursting when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, who knew exactly what Carroll meant when she said "Laughing is a very good — I use the word weapon — to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention," the floor gave way a little.
We will find out soon if Tacopina's display also had that effect on the jury. But before then, a whole lot more ugliness is virtually guaranteed.
[Politico / Law & Crime / Daily Beast]
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Trump Is On Trial For Sexual Assault Today, And We Just Feel Tired
Trigger warning, for real.
Writer E. Jean Carroll, who's suing Donald Trump in federal court in New York for defamation and battery, began her testimony today with a straightforward declaration of what the trial is about: "I’m here because Trump raped me. He lied and shattered my reputation and I’m trying to get my life back."
Carroll sued Trump because after she wrote a book mentioning the alleged 1996 rape in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room, Trump called her claims a hoax, said that he'd never met her (of course, she'd been photographed with him), and, disgustingly, that he never would rape her since she wasn't his "type." Carroll also filed a second case against Trump after he was no longer "president," when he again claimed on social media that the entire case was false; that case includes a sexual battery claim against Trump under New York's Adult Survivors Act. More background on the lawsuits here:
In Case You Missed It!
E Jean Carroll Is Not F*cking Around
Trump's Lawyers Continue Pattern Of Bad Faith F*ckery In E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case
During her testimony today, Carroll, who acknowledges she's not certain of the exact date, said she was fairly certain it happened in the spring of 1996, because a friend, Lisa Birnbach, whom she told about the rape contemporaneously, had published an article about visiting Trump's Florida trash palace, Mar-a-Lago, in February of 1996.
Carroll testified, "I believe that Lisa never would have gone down to Mar-a-Lago if she knew what [Trump] had done to me." That drew an objection from Trump's lawyer, Joe Tacopina, but Judge Lewis Kaplan overruled it. Law Crime News editor Adam Klasfeld is live-tweeting the testimony, which he notes "mirrors her deposition" covering the events of that day.
Carroll said that the encounter began when she was leaving the store and Trump raised his hand up, imitating what she called the "universal" signal.
After Trump recognized her as the "advice lady," she replied: "Hey, you're that real estate tycoon," she says.
"You are so old," Carroll quoted him saying, calling his inflection "humorous."
After they went into the store to help Trump find a gift for a woman, Carroll says, Trump picked up a see-through, gray, body suit.
"It looks like a swimsuit, but this was see-through," she says. "It used to be called teddies."
She says Trump said: "Go put this on."
As she said in the deposition, Carroll said Trump's tone was joking, and she told him, "You put it on. It's your color." She considered the encounter at that point to be silly, something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch, and she agreed that she was flirting a bit with Trump, since it felt like a comedy.
Then once Trump got her into the dressing room, things suddenly changed immediately, as Trump "shoved" her up against the wall and she tried to push back. We won't go into the details of the assault here, because they'll be all over the news anyway and you don't want to read it every bit as much as I don't want to write it, even copy pasting. Carroll presented an unsparing, detailed account, testifying that "As I'm sitting here today, I still feel it."
Carroll said that afterward, she told Birnbach about it, thinking her friend might find it funny:
Asked pointedly why she ever would have thought that, Carroll replies: "I had not processed it. I had not processed what was going on."
Asked if she thinks any part of it was funny today, Carroll replies: “No, it was tragic.”
Carroll said that Birnbach, who is an anticipated witness, told her:
“He raped you. He raped you, E. Jean. You should go to the police."
"I said ‘No way.’"
"She said, ‘I’ll go with you.'"
Another friend, Carol Martin, who's also expected to testify, told her to "keep it to yourself" because Trump "has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.”
Carroll also said that she decided to stay silent, in part, because women who've been assaulted are treated as "soiled goods":
"People say, 'You're so brave. You're so brave,'" but also: "I don't know," questioning whether the woman should have been smarter, should have screamed, or shouldn't have flirted so much.
And of course Trump's defense will be that none of this ever happened and that Carroll is just making it all up for the fame and notoriety, although we'd note that most women who accuse famous powerful men of rape tend not to end up rich and famous so much as judged and publicly mocked. Honestly can't recall any rich famous rape victims who didn't get dragged for coming forward, honestly.
Also in court today, Judge Kaplan warned Tacopina that his idiot client should stop posting on social media about the trial, because of course Trump is exactly that stupid. On his pretend Twitter replacement site, Trump this morning mocked the very idea that he would have raped Carroll, who was then "almost 60," and tried to cast doubt on details of her account, insisting that he was so very famous that if anyone had seen him with a woman, it would have made "BIG PRESS."
He also accused Carroll's attorney of being a "political operative," and said that the lawsuit was being funded by a "big political donor that they tried to hide." Returning to a point that was already ruled out of evidence, Trump also pretended that there was something very fishy about Carroll's attorneys not being willing to do a DNA test on the dress she'd worn that day. In reality, Trump refused to supply a DNA sample for years, and then Tacopina only offered to have Trump provide one shortly before the trial started, which would have required a delay of the trial.
NBC News reports that
Judge Kaplan suggested to Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina that the former president could risk being sued or having sanctions imposed for the Truth Social posts he issued Wednesday morning.
“We are getting into an area in which your client could face a new liability and I think you know what I mean,” Kaplan said.
Judge Kaplan also pointed out to Tacopina that Trump "refused to get DNA sample and now he wants it in the case?” Tacopina said he would have a word with the shithead he represents, and would ask him not to discuss the case on social media. That should go really well, we bet. Get ready for the "Inside the Carroll Trial" reports in six months, in which we'll learn Trump threatened to fire Tacopina, threw ketchup at him, and finally pouted and shut up for a few days.
[NBC News / Adam Klasfeld on Twitter]
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