Hyderabad: A six-year-old girl found a good samaritan in a bike taxi rider when the latter saved her from getting raped by a 19-year-old man at Errum Manzil.
According to the Punjagutta police, the incident took place on Friday night when the cab driver was waiting for a pickup. He noticed the accused from a distance beating the girl.
Acting quickly, he intervened. Upon questioning, the accused claimed the girl was his daughter. However, the girl refuted her abuser’s claims and complained about pain in her private parts.
Following this, the cab driver immediately informed the police. The accused, a fruit vendor, was arrested under the POCSO Act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act) and sent to judicial remand on Sunday.
“Had the driver not intervened on time, the situation would have been worse,” said a police officer.
The police officer revealed that the accused and the minor were residents of the same local slum. The accused would often force himself on her whenever she was alone, the police officer said.
Pilibhit: Two persons, accused of raping a minor, were caught by villagers, tied to a tree and thrashed in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district.
They were later handed over to the police.
According to reports, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly raped by two men aged between 22 and 25 years in a village falling under the limits of Seramau North police circle in Pilibhit.
On hearing the victim’s screams, the locals rushed towards the spot and caught the duo while they were attempting to flee.
They were tied to a tree and thrashed. Later, they were handed over to the police.
The victim’s brother has filed a police complaint, following which an FIR was lodged in the matter.
“The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 D (gangrape), 506 (criminal intimidation) and appropriate sections of the POCSO Act. The girl has been sent for medical examination to the district women’s hospital,” said a police spokesman.
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 )
But Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina had demurred when asked several times by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan whether Trump would testify, leaving the option open.
On Tuesday, however, Tacopina informed Kaplan that Trump had decided against taking the witness stand.
The jury, however, will hear from Trump, albeit not live or in person. An attorney for Carroll said she expects to play about 45 minutes of a videotaped deposition of Trump for jurors.
Jurors heard from a variety of witness on Tuesday, including a friend of Carroll’s, Lisa Birnbach, who testified that Carroll called her about five minutes after the alleged incident at Bergdorf’s and, “breathless” and “hyperventilating,” told Birnbach that Trump had attacked her. Jurors also heard from a woman named Jessica Leeds, who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her on an airplane in the late 1970s.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Mumbai: A case of rape cannot be quashed merely because the victim granted her consent to do so, the Bombay High Court said on Wednesday while expressing its disinclination to quash an FIR of rape registered against T-Series owner Bhushan Kumar.
Kumar had filed the petition seeking for the FIR to be quashed on the ground that the victim took back her complaint and consented for the same to be set aside.
A division bench of Justices A S Gadkari and P D Naik, however, noted that merely because the complainant was granting her consent was not ground enough to quash the first information report (FIR) alleging rape.
“Merely because the parties are consenting does not mean an FIR under section 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code should be quashed. We have to see the contents of the FIR, the statements recorded to see if the crime was heinous or not. The relationship (in this case) from the contents does not seem consensual,” the court said.
Kumar’s advocate Niranjan Mundargi told the court that the FIR was registered in July 2021 for an incident that was allegedly happening since 2017.
He said that a B-summary report (false case or no case made out against the accused) had been filed by the police before the concerned magistrate’s court.
A local politician Mallikarjun Pujari filed a protest petition against such B-summary, claiming he had helped the woman register the FIR, however the woman had granted her consent to close the proceedings.
The magistrate’s court rejected the police’s report in April 2022.
The high court on Wednesday perused the FIR, the affidavit submitted by the complainant woman giving her consent for the case to be quashed and the order passed by the magistrate’s court.
The bench was of the opinion that the material did not reflect that the relationship between the accused and the woman was consensual.
“Contents of the consent affidavit are not sufficient to quash FIR. Generally under section 376, FIR can be quashed with the consent of the complainant. But then that is after the FIR or the affidavit shows that there was a consensual relationship. Here the complainant is only saying she doesn’t want to proceed with the case due to ‘circumstantial misunderstanding’,” the court said. When the bench expressed its disinclination to allow the petition and quash the case, Mundargi sought time to submit further material in support of the plea.
The bench then posted the matter for further hearing on July 2, 2023.
On Wednesday morning, Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, about the lawsuit. He called Carroll’s lawyer a “political operative” and said her legal defense is “financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist.” He attacked Carroll directly, calling her “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman” and saying she was “like a different person” during a CNN interview.
“This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!” he wrote.
Trump also alluded to a dress that Carroll says she was wearing on the day of the alleged rape. After filing her lawsuit, Carroll’s lawyers sought a DNA sample from Trump so they could compare it with DNA found on the dress. Trump initially refused but later changed tactics, offering to provide a sample if Carroll’s legal team turned over the full DNA report on the dress. Kaplan rejected that proposal earlier this year.
Before the jury entered the courtroom on Wednesday, a lawyer for Carroll notified Kaplan of Trump’s comments. In response, Kaplan warned Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina that Trump’s statement was “entirely inappropriate.”
“What seems to be the case is that your client is basically endeavoring, certainly, to speak to his quote unquote public, but more troublesome, to the jury in this case,” Kaplan said.
Before the trial began, Kaplan barred both sides from “any testimony, argument, commentary or reference concerning DNA evidence.”
“Here’s all I can tell you: I will speak to my client and ask him to refrain from any further posts regarding this case,” Tacopina told the judge. Seemingly acknowledging the difficulty of restraining the former president, Tacopina added: “I will do the best I can do, your honor. That’s all I can say.”
Trump, who isn’t required to attend the trial, hasn’t appeared in the courtroom.
The judge then warned Tacopina that Trump could expose himself to greater culpability if he continued to make statements related to the case.
“We’re getting into an area, conceivably, where your client may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability,” Kaplan said, adding: “and I think you know what I mean.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Trump was almost twice her size,” Crowley said to the jury. “He held down her arm, pulled down her tights and then he sexually assaulted her.”
Trump, who isn’t required to appear at the proceedings, didn’t attend the first day of the trial. His lawyer, Joe Tacopina, sought to portray Carroll’s claim as a “sick story” while also trying to reassure jurors that they could side with his client even if they dislike him.
“You can hate Donald Trump. It’s OK,” Tacopina told jurors. “But there’s a time and a secret place for that. It’s called a ballot box. Not here, in a court of law.”
“While no one is above the law, no one is also beneath the law,” he continued. “Politicians don’t make this country great, jurors do.”
Carroll, Tacopina argued, was motivated by money and by politics. He questioned her claim that no shoppers or employees were around to witness the incident in the department store, and he emphasized that she couldn’t recall certain details, most notably the precise timing of the alleged attack.
“You learned that E. Jean Carroll can’t tell you the date. She can’t tell you the month. She can’t tell you the season. She can’t even tell you the year,” he said.
“Evidence will tell you that E. Jean Carroll can’t do any of those things because the story isn’t true.”
To combat some of those arguments, Crowley emphasized two main points in her opening statements: that Carroll’s account is corroborated by two friends she told contemporaneously and by former Bergdorf Goodman employees who can testify to physical attributes of the store at that time, and that Trump’s alleged assault of Carroll is part of a pattern. More than two dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct.
Two other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stynoff, are set to testify, and Carroll’s attorneys have received permission from the judge to use the “Access Hollywood” tape — in which Trump boasts on a hot mic that “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” adding, “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything” — as evidence at trial.
Trump’s lawyer, Tacopina, dismissed the significance of the tape, calling it a “lewd conversation from 20 years ago.” The tape was recorded in 2005 and became public in 2016.
“It’s foolish, but it’s locker room talk,” he said. “It’s not an admission.”
Crowley also seized on a statement Trump made in disputing Carroll’s claims that Carroll is “not my type!”
First, Crowley told the jury, “we all know what that means: He was saying she was too ugly to assault.”
Later in her remarks, she also argued that his comment was not only offensive but also a lie. Describing a portion of his videotaped deposition that Carroll’s lawyers intend to show the jury, Crowley showed jurors a black and white photograph of Trump with Carroll.
“When Trump was shown this photograph at his deposition late last year, he looked at it, he pointed to it, unprompted, and he said, ‘It’s Marla! Yeah, it’s Marla, my wife,’” Crowley said, raising her voice.
“He mistook her for Marla Maples, his second wife, a former model, who he admitted was exactly his type.”
The trial is expected to last between one and two weeks, and testimony is set to begin Wednesday. While Trump isn’t expected to attend the trial in coming days, the judge nevertheless offered an instruction that appeared aimed at the absent defendant.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who in court filings took issue with Trump’s recent comments urging his supporters to protest criminal charges against him, advised the lawyers to warn their clients against making remarks that “inspire violence.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: Telangana High Court on Tuesday set aside an order of POCSO Court for treating one of the minor accused in the Jubilee Hills gang rape case as major.
On a petition filed by one of the minor accused challenging the POCSO Court order, the High Court delivered its judgment. With the High Court’s order, the sensational case will now be tried with four accused as majors and two accused as minors.
In September last year, the lower court had ruled that four of the five minors involved in the case can be tried as majors in view of the graveness of the crime.
Six accused including a major were arrested in June last year for the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in a car in posh Jubilee Hills neighbourhood of Hyderabad.
The accused had trapped the victim after a daytime party at a bar and after offering a lift sexually assaulted her.
The crime was committed on May 28 but came to light only on May 31 after the victim’s father lodged a complaint with the police. The case had triggered national outrage.
Five accused including the son of a leader of the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (TRS) have been charged with gang rape while sixth accused, who is the son of a legislator of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), is facing molestation charges.
Saduddin Malik and four minors were booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 376 D (gang rape), 323 (causing hurt), Section 5 (G) (gang penetrative sexual assault on child) read with Section 6 of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 366 (kidnapping a woman) and 366 A (procuration of a minor girl) and Section 67 of Information Technology Act.
The sixth minor was not involved in rape but he kissed the victim in the car. He was booked under IPC Section 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 323 and Section 9 (G) read with 10 of POCSO Act.
On June 28, police filed a charge sheet both in Nampally Criminal Court and Juvenile Justice Board as five of the six accused in the case were minors.
The police, however, made a plea to the Juvenile Justice Board to allow the minors to be treated as majors for trial in view of the serious nature of the offence. In September, the Board gave its nod and later the POCSO Court also ruled in its favour.
The rape case brought in New York against Donald Trump by the famed advice columnist E Jean Carroll has caught the attention of America as the latest legal drama to involve the former US president.
The case is so far the only one to come to court among more than a dozen allegations of rape, groping and other sexual assaults made against Trump.
What does Carroll accuse Trump of?
Carroll has filed two separate lawsuits against Trump. The first accuses him of defamation after he accused her of lying in her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, in which she accuses Trump and other men of abusing her.
Carroll brought the second lawsuit after New York passed a law last year giving adult victims of sexual assault a window of one year to file civil actions against their assailants where the statute of limitations has expired. She is seeking damages after accusing Trump of assaulting her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s.
The first lawsuit is on hold amid legal wrangling about whether the Trump can be sued for comments he made while president.
What was Trump’s response to the accusations?
Trump denied the allegations with his usual vigour, at various times saying that Carroll was “totally lying” and calling her a “nut job”. He also claimed that he would never have assaulted her because she was “not my type”.
Trump also claimed never to have met Carroll, even though they were photographed together with their spouses in 1987.
He said: “I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
Why is the US justice department siding with Trump in Carroll’s defamation lawsuit?
The justice department asked to move the defamation case from state to federal court on the grounds that Trump’s public statements in 2019 denying rape were made as part of his job as president. The administration then argued that Carroll is not suing Trump as an individual but as an employee of the US government, and that therefore the government should be substituted for Trump as the defendant.
“The government thus asserts that this case is virtually identical in principle to a lawsuit against a Postal Service driver for causing a car accident while delivering the mail,” said the judge in considering the position.
The judge rejected the claim that the president is just another government worker and said that, in any case, his statements about Carroll were not within the scope of his employment.
The issue is due to be considered by the Washington DC appeals court.
What will happen if Trump loses the sexual assault case?
If the jury finds that Trump did rape or otherwise assault Carroll, it is likely to order him to pay damages. It will also mean that for the first time in US history, a jury will have found a former president is a rapist.
Political scientists say it is unlikely to do much damage to Trump’s run for the Republican presidential nomination next year because his more ardent supporters regard the various legal cases against him as a conspiracy.
But it will add to his already considerable political baggage in the general election and prove a further obstacle to re-election as president.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
And, of course, a civil verdict against Trump would add to his avalanche of legal troubles as he is seeking to regain the presidency while under indictment in an unrelated case and facing the possibility of additional criminal charges in several other investigations.
The trial is also risky for Carroll, who must convince a jury to believe her accusation against an incredibly high-profile defendant for an incident that allegedly occurred nearly 30 years ago and lacked any eyewitnesses.
According to Carroll, one night in either late 1995 or early 1996, she bumped into Trump while she was leaving Bergdorf Goodman. He recognized her, she said, because they had met once before and “had long traveled in the same New York City media circles.” Telling her that he was at the store to buy a present for “a girl,” Trump asked Carroll for her advice, and after the two discussed a few ideas, Trump suggested visiting the lingerie department, according to the lawsuit.
There, on the counter, they saw a lilac gray see-through bodysuit, and the two teased each other about which one of them should try it on, the lawsuit says. According to Carroll, Trump then “grabbed” her arm, “maneuvered” her to the dressing room and closed the door. There were no attendants or other shoppers nearby, Carroll said.
Once inside the dressing room, Trump pushed her up against the wall, bumping her head and “putting his mouth on her lips,” according to Carroll. After she pushed him back, she said, he “seized both of her arms,” pushed her again and then “jammed his hand under her coatdress and pulled down her tights.”
After unzipping his pants, “Trump then pushed his fingers around Carroll’s genitals and forced his penis inside of her,” according to the lawsuit.
After breaking free by raising up her knee and pushing him off, she said she ran out of Bergdorf’s and immediately called a friend, Lisa Birnbach, and told her about the incident. “He raped you,” Birnbach said, according to Carroll. Birnbach encouraged her to call the police, but “still in shock and reluctant to think of herself as a rape victim, Carroll did not want to speak to the police,” the lawsuit says.
Several days later, Carroll says she disclosed the events to another friend, Carol Martin. Martin advised Carroll to tell no one, advice she says she took.
Carroll’s attorneys have indicated they likely will call both Birnbach and Martin to testify. Both women backed up her account in media interviews shortly after Carroll went public with her claims in 2019.
Trump, for his part, denies the entire episode. He said in 2019 that he had “never met this person in my life” and that she was manufacturing stories about him for the purpose of selling a book in which she detailed the alleged assault. Last year, he repeated the denials on his social media site and again accused her of promoting a “hoax,” adding that, “while I am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type!”
In court filings, Trump’s attorneys have suggested that his defense may include questioning the plausibility of Carroll’s claim that there were no customers or staff around to witness the incident, drilling into the notion that she can’t pinpoint the date when the attack allegedly occurred and arguing that Carroll is politically and financially motivated.
Lawyers for Carroll and Trump declined to comment.
Carroll is suing him for sexual assault under the Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 New York law that gave a one-year window beginning in November of that year for people to sue their alleged assailants even if the statute of limitations had expired, which it had in Carroll’s case. In addition to the sexual-assault claim, Carroll is suing Trump in this week’s trial for defamation over his 2022 comments.
In a separate lawsuit, she is also suing him for defamation regarding his 2019 comments; the trial for that case is delayed pending a ruling on whether Trump can be sued personally for comments he made while he was president.
Civil lawsuits arising from sexual assaults are not uncommon. (Trump is not even the first president to be sued for sexual misconduct: Paula Jones famously sued Bill Clinton during his presidency for sexual harassment in a case that reached the Supreme Court.) But the Trump trial will require highly unusual measures. Perhaps most significantly, the judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, has ordered an anonymous jury — meaning the names of the jurors will not be disclosed to the public or to Carroll, Trump or their attorneys — due to “a very strong risk that jurors will fear harassment.”
In his order regarding the unusual step of protecting the juror’s identities, Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, cited a series of alleged threats of violence by Trump, his attacks on jurors in other cases, his encouragement of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and his statement urging his supporters to protest what he predicted would be his arrest in connection with the district attorney’s investigation.
In another twist, Trump has indicated that he probably won’t attend the trial. In a court filing, his lawyers cited the “logistical burdens” of him appearing in court due to his Secret Service protection, a wrinkle the judge rejected as an adequate reason for failing to appear, while noting that he has no legal obligation to either attend or testify.
In other ways, however, the case is typical of sexual assault lawsuits. Such cases are commonly brought many years after the incident in question, because victims often take a long time to come to terms with what has happened to them, and often center on a situation witnessed by no one but the plaintiff and the defendant, said Peter Saghir, a lawyer who represented Anthony Rapp in his battery trial against Kevin Spacey, whom Rapp accused of making a “sexual advance” on him in 1986. (A jury found Spacey not liable for battery.)
“These cases are so difficult because these events are almost always unwitnessed,” Saghir said. “I’m sure Trump is going to be arguing, clearly if I raped someone, why wasn’t she screaming? Why wasn’t she yelling? There’s no video. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. It’s usually one person’s word against the other word.”
In Carroll’s case, he noted, she does have corroboration from the two friends she says she told contemporaneously.
Carroll’s case is also likely to hinge on her own testimony and whether a jury believes her story, said Jordan Merson, a lawyer who represents five women suing Bill Cosby for sexual abuse. “It seems like Trump’s legal team is going after her credibility, so her cross examination when she’s on the witness stand is going to be a very important part of the case.”
Merson noted that cross examination for a sexual assault victim can be “very difficult” because the plaintiff is being challenged on something they typically find painful to talk about under even the most inviting circumstances.
If the jury does believe Carroll’s story about the alleged rape, Merson said the defamation claim may significantly boost any monetary award she is given. Carroll is seeking unspecified damages — and for Trump to retract the statement he made about her on his social media site.
“Juries tend to be very sympathetic to survivors of sexual abuse, especially if there’s any type of verbal disparagement thereafter,” Merson said. “If the jury finds for Ms. Carroll, you could be looking at a very significant damages award,” he said. “Many millions of dollars.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
