Donald Trump continues to face an ongoing lawsuit alleging sexual assault. A woman named E. Jean Carroll is suing the former president, claiming that he attacked her during the 1990s.
You make remember Carroll from some of her eccentric media appearances during the latter years of the Trump administration. For example, at one point, she stated that she should have asked for his tax returns after he allegedly raped her in the dressing room of a department store. She also refused to allow DNA testing on the dress she claims to have been wearing. Further, she called rape “sexy” in an interview on CNN.
Whatever one wants to make of her story, it’s certainly been presented in a very odd way, at best. Perhaps there’s a reason for that? According to Yahoo News, Carroll isn’t going after Trump alone. Instead, she’s being funded by a billionaire Democrat megadonor named Reid Hoffman. Hoffman is the founder of the influential social media network LinkedIn.
Wow. Reid Hoffman, funder of various Democratic disinfo operations https://t.co/a8Cuc8qsd4
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 13, 2023
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire behind LinkedIn who’s now a megadonor to Democrats, has been quietly bankrolling E. Jean Carroll’s rape case against former President Donald Trump, according to court records filed Thursday.
The surprising last-minute disclosures came out in contentious correspondence between lawyers for the aggrieved journalist and the pissed off former president, who are battling over whether to delay the trial scheduled to start in two weeks.
While it’s unclear if that payment arrangement has any material impact on the case itself, the fact that it remained secret until now will surely support Trump’s unrelenting, conspiratorial complaints that ultra rich liberals have been pulling the strings on the efforts to take him down.
One can’t help but notice the absurdity of Reuters (the wire service Yahoo News is publishing) calling Trump’s claims conspiratorial while their own article confirms his claims. There are ultra-rich liberals pulling strings in an effort to take him down. How is that even a question at this point? And why else would Hoffman be dumping cash into a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault if that wasn’t the goal?
Hoffman has a checkered history regarding politics. In 2018, it was discovered that he was funding a bot farm that pushed disinformation about an Alabama senate candidate. He also had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The fact that he’s involved in the Carroll case is a red flag. Hoffman doesn’t get involved in anything that isn’t highly political, and this is likely no different.
Another issue here is that Carroll apparently lied in a deposition. She had previously claimed under oath that she was receiving no outside funding (Fortune).
At the deposition, Carroll said she had a contingency-fee arrangement for paying her lawyers and answered “no” when asked if she was receiving outside funding for the litigation, which began in November 2019. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in her letter to Habba that her client remembered just recently that she had been told at some point about outside funding by a nonprofit.
Habba said she didn’t buy that. She called the funding a sign of bias that raises questions about Carroll’s motives in bringing the suit.
“The proposition that plaintiff has suddenly ‘recollected’ the source of her funding for this high-profile litigation — which has spanned four years, spawned two separate actions, and been before numerous state, federal, and appellate courts — is not only preposterous, it is demonstrably false,” Habba said.
This case continues to see twists and turns, and there’s a lot of reason to be suspicious, especially given these latest revelations, that this isn’t a sincere lawsuit. Whether those concerns will move the judge and ultimately the jury handling the case is another matter.
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