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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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The only ingredients you need are to levy an accusation and wait for your target's inevitable protest.

And a crucial third ingredient: have the intended victim of this trap be Donald Trump. Other people in other situations, such as Hillary Clinton defaming the women who accused Bill Clinton of raping them, are not dragged into civil cases.

Are we to interpret this as a consistent principle that judges would apply to prominent Democratic politicians when they deny accusations? Or just a weapon to be used on Trump and then put away?

Well I first heard about it when it happened to Bill Cosby, maybe that's where Jean Carroll's lawyers got the idea from. I don't see the evidence that this legal tactic was invented for Trump.

E Jean Carroll was advocating for the law to be passed so that she could sue trump.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-accuser-pushes-new-york-pass-adult-survivors-act-plans-sue-rape-1668261

Hillary Clinton defamed those women and then did not get dragged into civil suit.

Bill Clinton indeed got impeached for lying about a consensual blowjob. But that has nothing to do with Hillary defaming his rape victims.

These are separate matters so let's not blend them all together into some composite for comparison.

...none of which is Hillary clinton being sued for defamation for, to put it bluntly, calling the women accusing her husband of rape lying sluts.

Was James Carville ever sued? He was the one that commented that "[i]f you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find," which seems far more insulting than anything I can think of HRC saying herself. Though it's probably too vague to be slanderous, legally-speaking.

Yep, it's too vague to be slanderous. You're allowed to insult people, you just can't claim that they did things that they didn't do. Even more specific epithets like "racist" have been ruled too vague to support a claim of defamation.

What are the specific statements she made you think constitute defamation?

In a '98 NBC interview she called the sexual assault allegations against her husband a "vast right-wing conspiracy".

During her NBC interview, when Lauer said, "So when people say there's a lot of smoke here, your message is, where there's smoke..." Clinton interrupted.

"There isn't any fire," she said. After the allegations and motivations are dissected and the truth emerges, she predicted, "some folks are going to have a lot to answer for."

This was in an NBC interview, not a courthouse (like Trump's comments), and appears to directly suggest that all of the women are liars, which appears at least modestly similar to Trump's supposedly-defamatory remarks.

Ultimately, I think I have to conclude that denying allegations should probably enjoy specific privilege from defamation concerns.

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