Attorney Joseph Tacopina is defending Donald Trump in the defamation lawsuit brought by former Elle magazine journalist E. Jean Carroll. Carroll alleges that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and then lied about it in statements to the public; thanks to Tacopina, we’ve learned an awful lot about what Carroll did and didn’t do at the time of the alleged assault.
Tacopina, who is trying his best to exculpate Trump, is following a playbook for defending accusations of rape that has existed in the law for centuries, predating the founding of the American republic. These tried and true methods—which focus heavily on discrediting the victim—harken back to one of the original scholars of what we now understand to be the modern legal system, William Blackstone. Blackstone’s legal commentaries were almost universally relied on for their explication of English common law. With specific regard to the crime of rape, however, Blackstone himself drew upon the precepts of his predecessor, the 17th-century English barrister and jurist Lord Matthew Hale.
If the name of Matthew Hale seems familiar, it should. As noted by The New York Times’ Jessica Bennett, Hale was cited eight times by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Association decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
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