In the deposition, conducted at Mar-a-Lago in October, Kaplan asked Trump about the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording from 2005 in which Trump can be heard saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” adding: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
“Well, historically that’s true with stars,” Trump replied after watching a clip of his comments.
When Kaplan pressed him on whether he stood by the statement that a star could “grab them by the pussy,” the former president said: “Well, I guess if you look over the last million years, that’s been largely true — not always true, but largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.”
“And you consider yourself to be a star?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah,” Trump said.
During the deposition, Kaplan questioned him about several other women who have accused him of sexual assault, women Trump has characterized as not being his “type.”
Growing belligerent, Trump told Kaplan herself that “you wouldn’t be a choice of mine, either, to be honest.” He added: “I wouldn’t in any circumstances have any interest in you.”
Trump has defended himself by saying Carroll, too, isn’t his “type,” but earlier in the deposition, after he was shown a photograph of himself engaging with Carroll at a party, he confused the image of her with that of one of his ex-wives, Marla Maples.
“It’s Marla,” he said, looking at the photo. “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”
“I take it the three women you’ve married are all your type?” Kaplan asked him later. “Yeah,” he replied.
Calling Carroll “mentally sick” and a “nut job,” Trump suggested, as he had previously, that he didn’t know her.
“She’s accusing me of rape, a woman who I have no idea who she is,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape — the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Starting on Wednesday afternoon and continuing Thursday, the jury watched about 45 minutes of excerpts of the deposition. On Thursday, jurors also heard from witnesses including Carol Martin, a longtime friend of Carroll’s. Martin testified that Carroll told her about the alleged rape at Bergdorf’s a day or two after it happened.
“I’m here … to reiterate and remember what my friend E. Jean Carroll told me … about 27 years ago,” Martin said on the witness stand.
She added: “I believed it then and I believe it today.” After an objection from Trump’s lawyer, the judge — without elaboration — instructed the jury to disregard her last comment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
An Indigenous mother whose son was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by her former partner says her baby could still be alive if police had done their job properly and believes officers failed her family in “every way”.
In testimony on Thursday, Tamica Mullaley says she described how she was left bleeding after being attacked by her abusive partner Mervyn Bell in Broome in 2013 – but when police arrived after being called to assist her, they arrested her, claiming she was abusive to officers.
Bell returned to the house, took the boy and murdered him. Bell was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering and sexually assaulting Charlie. Bell killed himself in prison in 2015.
Mullaley says she told the inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children on Thursday how her father, Ted, had repeatedly tried to raise the alarm. Ted told police Bell had made threats towards the baby and that they needed to immediately search for him.
But authorities took hours to act on the information, before issuing incorrect licence plate details for the car Bell was driving when he took the baby, Mullaley said.
When asked if she felt police failed her and Charlie, Mullaley replied: “Bloody oath they did, in every way.”
“He would still be here if they did their job right, there’s only one road out of Broome and if they had of done their job they would have been able to get him along that road,” Mullaley told Guardian Australia.
After they found out Charlie was dead, she alleged police came to her house and “were abusing and being racist towards my dad”.
“If my family were white, there would have been more care, more help,” she said.
Mullaley was charged with resisting arrest, while Ted Mullaley was charged with obstructing arrest.
The WA government apologised in 2022 over the police treatment of the family, and both Mullaley and her father were officially pardoned by the WA attorney general, John Quigley. Quigley said both had been charged while enduring “the unthinkable”.
Mullaley said she told the inquiry police officers needed cultural competency training specific to the regions in which they worked.
After traveling from Broome to Perth for this week’s hearing, Mullaley met with senators who form part of the inquiry committee on Friday. She said she was grateful for the opportunity to share her family’s anguish, in the hope that it could bring change and accountability.
“We’ve all come in and been invited here. It shows they’re aware of it. They’re aware that there is something wrong and it needs to be changed,” the Yamatji mother said.
The Mullaley family has fought for years for an inquest into baby Charlie’s death in the hopes that no family would have to endure a similar pain. Mullaley said she told the committee inquests into missing or murdered Aboriginal women and children need to be mandatory.
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Chair of the inquiry, Queensland senator Paul Scarr, said the inquiry was critical to improving responses to missing and murdered Indigenous women and children and preventing violence.
“As a Senate committee, we need to shine a bright light on this issue and grab the attention of lawmakers, stakeholders and the Australian public. We have people in our community who have been absolutely traumatised,” he said.
“We have to focus on doing whatever we can, in a practical sense to come up with recommendations to try and constructively address this.”
Dr Hannah McGlade, a member of the UN permanent forum on Indigenous issues and women’s safety advocate, is supporting families of those who have been murdered.
She said reforms are needed to ensure Indigenous families are treated appropriately in all circumstances.
“We see a pattern of under-policing when it comes to Aboriginal women and children as victims and over-policing of Aboriginal people as offenders or perceived offenders,” she said.
“It’s a serious violation of our international human rights obligations and there has to be appropriate responses by the Australian government.”
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Donald Trump’s lawyer told a New York jury on Tuesday that the advice columnist E Jean Carroll conspired with other women to falsely accuse the former president of rape because they “hate” him for winning the 2016 election.
The opening day of a civil trial in a Manhattan federal court heard that Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation “to clear her name, to pursue justice and to get her life back” after the former president allegedly raped her in a New York department store in 1996 and then denied it years later.
But Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, told the jury of three women and six men that Carroll filed the lawsuit for political ends, to sell a book and for public attention.
Tacopina said that the rape accusation was invented by Carroll and two other women who are expected to testify that she told them about the assault shortly afterwards.
“They schemed to hurt Donald Trump politically,” he said.
Tacopina suggested to the jury that Carroll first accused then president Trump of rape after meeting George Conway who was a vocal critic who was married to Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s closest aides in the White House. The judge upheld an objection to the claim by Carroll’s lawyers. It is not clear if Tacopina will return to it when Carroll gives evidence.
Carroll accuses Trump of assaulting her in a dressing room of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 after they ran into each other at the entrance and he asked for help in choosing a present for a friend.
Carroll sat stony faced at the front of the courtroom as her lawyer, Shawn Crowley, told the jury that Trump manoeuvred her client into a dressing room and then attacked her. The lawyer said Trump banged Carroll’s head against the wall, pinned her arms back with one hand, pulled her tights down with the other and then rammed his fingers into her vagina.
Crowley said that Carroll kicked Trump and tried to knee him off but he was too strong for her.
“He removed his hand and forced his penis inside her,” the lawyer told the jury.
Crowley addressed what she said would be two of the biggest questions on the jurors minds. Why did Carroll go into the dressing room with Trump? And why didn’t she report the alleged rape to the police at the time?
An artist’s drawing of the court proceedings. Photograph: Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
The lawyer said that when Trump suggested Carroll try on a see-through bodysuit, she pushed it back at him and said he should be the one to try it on as it was his colour. Trump then took her by the arm and led Carroll to the dressing room.
“To her, the situation was harmless and funny,” said Crowley. “The truth is she didn’t see Trump as a threat.”
Crowley said that Carroll did tell two friends after the assault. One advised her to go to the police. The other said to keep quiet because Trump was a powerful man. Crowley said that Carroll was “filled with fear and shame” that kept her silent for decades.
“In her mind, for many years, she thought what happened to her was her fault,” Crowley told the jury.
When Carroll did decide to speak out after Trump’s election in 2016 and with the rise of the #MeToo movement, she faced a barrage of “vicious attacks” by the president.
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Crowley said that Trump’s deposition late last year will provide damning evidence against him. She noted that, in denying the alleged assault, the former president had said Carroll was not his type.
“We all know what that means. He was saying she was too ugly to assault,” the lawyer told the jury.
Crowley said that during the deposition, Trump was shown a photograph of himself meeting Carroll in the late 1980s. But he mistook the woman in the picture for his second wife, Marla Maples, who Crowley said was “very much his type”.
Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, ridiculed Carroll’s account and accused her of abusing the justice system to express her hate for the former president.
“You learn that E Jean Carroll can’t tell you the date she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the month she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the season. She can’t even tell you the year,” he said, pointing out that the plaintiff has previously said it was 1995 or 1996.
Tacopina told the jury that it was not believable that no one in a major department store saw Carroll and Trump together and that there were no staff in the area where the alleged assault took place. He also said that it was standard practice at Bergdorf Goodman to keep changing rooms locked until a customer asked to be let in and yet Carroll said the door was open.
Tacopina questioned Carroll’s version of why she did not call the police.
“E Jean Carroll once called the police on teenagers who vandalised her mailbox but not when she was violently raped,” he told the jury.
Earlier, the jury of three women and six men was chosen from a pool of about 100 people who were questioned about whether they could set aside their political beliefs and views of the #MeToo movement to decide the case fairly.
They were also asked if they supported Antifa, Jane’s Revenge, Redneck Revolt, the Ku Klux Klan or other extremist groups. Perhaps disappointingly for Trump and Carroll, no one in the jury pool said they followed them on social media or had read their columns or books. But nearly half had watched Trump presenting The Apprentice television programme.
The trial continues.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
It wasn’t immediately clear why the grand jury wouldn’t hear evidence in the Donald Trump case on Thursday. | Karsten Moran for POLITICO
NEW YORK — The Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged role in hush money payment to Stormy Daniels is evaluating an unrelated case Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter, making any potential indictment of the former president unlikely before next week.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the grand jury wouldn’t hear evidence in the Trump case on Thursday.
On Wednesday, the panel was adjourned, POLITICO reported. The grand jury typically meets Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and it heard from at least one witness in the Trump case earlier this week.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: The Supreme court bench comprising Justice BR Gavai, and Justice Aravind Kumar heard the BRS MLA Poaching case on Monday.
Senior advocate Dushyant Dave, representing the state government, requested the case be transferred back to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and asked for the Telangana High Court verdict to be struck down.
He told the bench that CBI is under BJP and that it should not investigate the issue.
Earlier this month, the apex court agreed to take up a plea filed by Telangana Police challenging the high court order which upheld the CBI probe into the alleged criminal conspiracy behind an attempt to poach BRS MLAs by the BJP.
A division bench of the High Court on February 6 upheld the earlier order of a single judge on December 26, 2022 transferring the case to CBI.
The plea argued that the high court did not appreciate that the CBI directly works under the Centre and is under the control of the office of the Prime Minister and the Home Ministry. The state government alleged the involvement of some top BJP leaders to poach its four MLAs, was an attempt to topple the government.
The plea said: “The Bharatiya Janata Party is in power in the Central Government and the allegations in the FIR are squarely and directly against the said party adopting illegal and criminal steps and methods to destabilise the Government of Telangana, the Hon’ble High Court therefore could not have entrusted the investigation to CBI in any case.”
“The High Court has unnecessarily drawn the conclusion that release of the CD by the Chief Minister on 03.11.2022 amounted to interference with the investigation and therefore concluded that investigation was not fair and violated the rights of accused for fair investigation,” it added.
