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Listen, he lost a libel case for denying he raped a woman. Because now if you deny you committed a crime, that's calling the person accusing you a liar, and that's libel.
A lot of people have lied about him. "Compelling case"? I hardly see how that matters.
Only in the most tortured interpretation of events. He actually lost the case for calling Carroll a liar, saying she was only accusing him to get publicity for herself and sell books, implying that she was working for the Democrats and/or that she was paid and suggesting she should 'pay dearly' for her accusations. It wasn't some legal trickery by which his denial was construed as implying she was a liar, he literally said she had made it up to sell books.
Didn't she?
Let's say I accuse you of raping me. You know that you have never raped me. You can honestly say you're innocent! You can also say, with 100% certainty that I am making it up. It shouldn't be libel for you to say that I'm making it up, because you are in a position where you can say that with certainty. Maybe I made it up because I am mentally unstable. But if I was also publicizing a book at the time, then you could reasonably infer that I made up to sell the book.
And this seems like the inference that everyone makes. Most liberals take this libel suit as evidence that Trump has been proven of rape in court.
I suppose this depends on the semantics of 'proven'. But the jury did in fact find that Trump had sexually abused Carroll (though not raped her), so in that sense he has been proven of sexual abuse (and of actual malice in his statements) in (a) court.
https://www.scribd.com/document/644110955/gov-uscourts-nysd-590045-174-0-1
If you want to make the case that Trump was reasonable to accuse her of lying, fine, but that's not the argument @WhiningCoil was making, who said that Trump had merely denied the accusations and that counter-accusation of lying was merely something people had read into his initial denial, not something he had explicitly done himself. However that would be merely a critique of the factual findings of the jury, not of their logic or of that of the trial/libel laws/judicial system themselves.
The jury's findings are about as ridiculous to me as Cardinal Pell's conviction in Australia. The story as portrayed has no basis in reality. It is really telling that Carroll's story was that Trump raped her and the jury didn't agree. Carroll's story is that Trump met the legal definition of rape - penetration with a penis - but the jury disagreed. The jury collectively said, "No, your story breaks the laws of physics and anatomy, but we will just change your testimony to 'fingers' instead of 'penis' and then pretend that doesn't have implications on the reliability on the rest of what you said."
It's not semantic to say that there is a crucial standard of evidence lacking that would have been required in a criminal conviction.
It is natural, when denying an allegation, to provide an alternative explanation for the facts. It is part and parcel of denying an allegation. If you ask a kid if she ate a cookie, she will deny it by saying, "No, the dog ate it." The explanation is part of the denial. It shouldn't be libel to provide an alternative explanation when someone is accusing you of something.
I don't know about New York, but in several states any penetration is legally rape if not consensual. Dildo in mouth could be rape. Finger in bellybutton could be rape. Finger in vagina could definitely be rape.
In New York specifically, rape as a legal definition means penis. The jury, using this specific legal definition, decided that Trump did not put his penis in Carroll.
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Not sure what you mean by this.
In the first place she did testify that Trump penetrated her digitally - yes, as you say she also testified as to penetration by his penis, but there was other evidence presented in the trial such that the jury might have been able to be confident of the former but not the latter. I can't see into their mind nor know what was presented and how, but it isn't ipso facto an absurd conclusion. Plus, I don't think their judgement means they don't think he did rape her, just that the evidence there presented was insufficient to prove it, so it needn't hurt her overall credibility.
True enough, the semantic point is how you use the word 'proven', and whether it applies to the standard of proof here (a preponderance of the evidence) or only to the criminal standard. I'm agnostic on the matter but in common parlance I can definitely see that one might use the word 'proven' to describe the former standard.
Sure but this is totally irrelevant to the logic of the jury, because they found that his denial was false in the first place, so his 'alternative explanation' was by extension wrong and, further, defamatory and malicious. If they had found that he had not sexually abused Carroll, they presumably would have not awarded any damages
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