Donald Trump’s attorney is suing a reporter for reporting a 1990 story about Donald Trump allegedly raping his wife.
A new article in the Daily Beast has just resurfaced a very old allegation – Donald Trump, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was once accused of raping his former wife, Ivana Trump, during a bedroom argument. But what’s the craziest part of this allegation is the legal response.
The rape allegation, Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak explains, comes from “The Last Tycoon,” a controversial 1993 biography of Donald Trump. In it, author Harry Hurt II quotes a deposition taken from Ivana during the couple’s divorce:
After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.
[…]
What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.
“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified…It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”
Ivana and Donald Trump’s lawyers later claimed that she had meant not literal rape, but some form of an emotional violation. Since then, Donald Trump has changed from a very unlikable real estate entrepreneur to a possible United States President.
When asked about Ivana’s twenty year old deposition, the Daily Beast received the following reponse from Donald Trump’s lawyer:
Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, “You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”
“It is true,” Cohen added. “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”
The Daily Beast reporter would later receive a ton of personal threats from Cohen, who says that when Ivana used the word rape, she meant only that “she didn’t feel emotionally satisfied” at the time:
“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up…for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet…you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.
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