Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $5 million to journalist E. Jean Carroll after she won a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault and battery. Author and podcaster Tara Reade, a former Senate aide to Joe Biden, compared the media’s trumpeting of Carroll’s claims with their dismissal of hers against the sitting president.
The US mainstream media is guilty of “hypocrisy” for accepting sex pest claims against Donald Trump while questioning her own against President Joe Biden.
Trump was ordered by a New York civil court to pay $2 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll for battery — after rejecting her sexual assault claim — plus $3 million for defaming the newspaper columnist while responding to her allegations.
Carroll first made her accusations against the former president in 2019, while he was in office, despite alleging that he forcibly kissed her in the changing room of the city’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996 while his second wife Marla Maples was trying on clothes in a cubicle.
Tara Reade, who has accused Biden in 2020 of sexually assaulting her in his Washington DC office in 1993 when she worked for him, told Sputnik that her own allegations had been supressed because they did not suit the media’s “narrative”.
“You have the mainstream media that has narrative, and a goal which was to make sure that Joe Biden was elected in 2020,” Reade said.
While unwilling to comment on the merits of Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump, the author said it could be seen as part of a broader campaign against the former president.
“Overall there’s been a will for the political death of Donald Trump. They’ve been trying to get him down in some way somehow, every way for years,” Reade said. “This sets a precedent in some ways. And so the Democrats and the ‘me too’ crowd you see crowing over the verdict, they’re ignoring me. And that shows you the hypocrisy.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, Saturday, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. – Sputnik International, 1920, 10.05.2023
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Reade, a lifelong Democrat supporter before the alleged incident with Biden, decried the “partisan” attitude towards serious criminal complaints like hers.
“Sexual violence is not partisan. It’s not about Red Team, Blue Team,” she stressed. “The fact that the mainstream media celebrates one victim because she’s accusing Republicans and demonizes another victim, myself, because I’ve accused a Democrat.”
She said the attitude of selectively echoing or dismissing allegations based on the political affiliation of the accused would only put women off reporting sexual harassment, abuse and rape.
“I’m sick of seeing the partisan hypocrisy. It’s damaging and it’s ugly,” Reade charged. “It’s another obstacle to put in the way if sexual violence is politicized in this way.”
