Tea at Trianon: Miscarriage of Justice

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 29, 2024

Miscarriage of Justice

From The National Pulse:

During the latest episode of this trial, Carroll admitted she wasn’t doing very well financially and needed to find a way to sell more books. The testimony appears to be the basis for the very first claim she ever made, in New York magazine’s The Cut, in the summer of 2019.

Far from a compelling claim, the 80-year-old writer initially laid out the story that her supposed rape occurred either in 1994, before altering the day to be “in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996.” She couldn’t remember the specifics. What she did remember was that she was wearing a “Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.” She later refused to produce said coat for DNA testing despite admitting to still owning it, describing it as “unworn and unlaundered since that evening.” It later came to light that the coatdress was not made in 1994 or 1995.
[...]
Carroll has admitted that she first considered bringing a suit against Trump during a house party hosted by far-left blogger Molly Jong-Fast.

Jong-Fast, a writer for the viciously ‘Never Trump’ publications the Atlantic, the Bulwark, the Daily Beast, and Vanity Fair, is the daughter of feminist activist Erica Jong and anti-gun author Jonathan Fast. She is also the granddaughter of communist author Howard Fast.

On one evening in 2019, Jong-Fast held a celebration for Kathy Griffin at her New York home. Griffin had recently been in the news for holding up a bloodied, severed prop head of President Donald Trump, suffering public backlash which she claimed “broke” her.

But while Griffin was being pieced back together by Jong-Fast and company at the “Resistance Twitter come to life” party, lawyer George Conway, once married to Trump’s pollster Kellyanne Conway, was convincing Jean Carroll to sue Donald Trump. Conway has form in this area, once being involved with an effort to sue Bill Clinton.

According to reporter Byron York: “Conway even suggested a lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who had co-founded a #MeToo legal defense nonprofit group called Time’s Up. Kaplan was apparently deeply committed to helping victims of sexual abuse but deeply committed to politics, too: In August 2021, she resigned from Time’s Up over sexual misconduct allegations against New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The problem was Kaplan was not standing up for victims but was “involved in an effort to discredit one of Mr. Cuomo’s alleged victims,” according to a New York Times report. The E. Jean Carroll case would be a mix of sex and politics but with a Republican villain.”

In other words, Kaplan was using Carroll as a means by which to repair her reputation, having attacked Governor Cuomo’s alleged victims. Kaplan – supposedly no relation to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Trump case – indeed became E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer. (Read more.)