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Good points. I did pre-qualify that I may need to update my priors.
I think it’s come from operation in a mistake theory mindset versus a conflict theory mindset. Mistake theory being a mentally ill lady perhaps with tds would magnify something that did happen in her head as she grew to hate Trump the President. Conflict theory being along the lines of people might actually just completely make things up ala Smollette for gain.
The part that makes this less believable is it occurring during the middle of the day in a public space where a simple scream would have place Donald Trump in cuffs and away for a few years. If the accusation was at 3 am after a night at the club it would seem more plausible.
Reid Hoffman point I give no credence to. Acting legally by funding opposition candidates in a Democracy is a lot different than participating in a fraudulent accusation. The only slight negative for Hoffman is I doubt he would ever vote for Haley so funding her I would consider as acting in bad faith.
You have a really different impression of how the legal system treated famous rich men in the 90s than I do.
This was around the same time as the OJ trial. If they can't convict a rich, famous man with the mountain of evidence present in that case and a nearly-decapitated body on the line, I don't see why they would bother to listen to some woman whining about getting fingered in a dressing room.
Maybe I'm wrong but I really believe the 90s were a different time to an almost impossible-to-convey degree, especially when it came to women being assaulted or abused. Even Anita Hill was turned into an attention-seeking floozy by the popular media of the day, every woman who got into the news accusing a famous or powerful man of something bad almost uniformly had their lives destroyed and stories inverted by the tabloid press of the day.
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