Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
By Chido Nwangwu. Follow on Twitter @Chido247
It’s the first time that a former president of the United States faced the difficult accusation of rape in a court of law.
At the end of the two weeks consideration of the evidence and proceedings, a nine-person jury found Donald J. Trump liable for sexual battery and defamation against journalist E. Jean Carroll.
But as in virtually all things Trump, he will not take responsibility for the tawdry and unseemly conduct and crassness recklessness he’s dragged the presidency of America to. This, shameful and scandalous as the other case involving his arranging payment to a prostitute for sexual peccadilloes. Only Trump!
On Tuesday May 9, 2023, it took the jury under three hours of deliberation to reach the conclusion that Trump was not liable for rape but for sexual battery/abuse and defamation.
Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in compensatory damages to Ms. Carroll.
As he usually would do, Trump denied any knowledge of the woman. Then, follow it up with calling her a couple of perjorative names. Trump tagged her a “whack job”
Trump and his ardent supporters think and insist the indictments and litigations against him are partisan twaddle set against him by Democrats to hurt his “reputation” and possibility of winning the 2024 presidential election.
He claimed “what’s happening is they’re doing this for election interference. This woman I don’t know her,” he said of Carroll. “I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”
She sued Trump in 2022, claiming Mr. Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store near Trump’s 5th Avenue residence in New York in the mid-1990s.
On Wednesday at the CNN Town Hall meeting, Trump insisted that the trial and litigation have not only failed to achieve its intended purpose but the opposite has happened: “Because my poll numbers just came out [and] they went up.”
The fact remains that there are still some of Trump’s fanatical types who (will) follow him to the zombie gates of mindlessness! There are patriotic Americans, too, who also champion his agenda. There are the nativists, the xenophobes, the anti-Semites and new groups of Proud Boys, and many others who follow him.
Many Republicans are worried about the unpredictable consequences of a very giddy, tawdry socio-political elephant such as Trump has since become for their Grand Old Party (GOP)!
Remarkably, it’s not talking about tax cuts and credits but seeing posters and magazines with all “types” of women still accusing the Donald of forced sexual acts, coerced kissing and all.
Dr. Chido Nwangwu, author of the forthcoming 2023 book, MLK, Mandela & Achebe: Power, Leadership and Identity., is Founder of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston.He has appeared as an analyst on CNN, ALJazeera, SKYnews, and served as an adviser on Africa business to Houston’s former Mayor Lee Brown. Follow him on Twitter @Chido247
