He of all individuals ought to keep away from making mild of assault allegations.
Donald Trump has been held liable for rape. He has been accused, by greater than 20 ladies, of sexual misconduct. He has denied every cost. He has additionally bragged about assaulting ladies and getting away with it.
One would possibly assume, then, that he would like to keep away from sexual violence as a marketing campaign subject. However Trump has not often let information get in his method—and because the 2024 presidential election attracts close to, he has been looking, ever extra desperately, to broaden his stock of assault traces towards Kamala Harris. And so, earlier as we speak, the previous president shared a meme on Fact Social: a picture, based mostly on a years-old and closely doctored picture, purporting to point out Harris posing subsequent to Sean “Diddy” Combs. “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT,” the meme asks, “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED WITH OR ENGAGED IN ONE OF PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS?”
The picture lies in the best way that doctored pictures sometimes do: by mixing fact and fakery. (The unique picture that the meme falsified, taken in 2001, depicts Harris with the talk-show host Montel Williams and his daughter Ashley. The model that Trump shared options Combs’s face grafted onto Williams’s physique.) However the meme’s textual content is incorrect too—in a method that reveals nothing about Harris’s conduct however every part about Trump’s.
“PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS” is a reference to a federal indictment unsealed this week accusing Combs of crimes that embody sexual abuse, intercourse trafficking, and, because the Related Press put it, “surprising acts of violence.” (Combs, having denied many earlier allegations of abuse, pleaded not responsible after being detained earlier this week.) The “freak offs,” because the indictment calls them, had been a collection of coerced intercourse acts that Combs allegedly organized, watched, and recorded. They concerned “extremely orchestrated performances of sexual exercise”—with ladies in Combs’s community and with male intercourse employees. Additionally they allegedly concerned manipulation and bodily hurt.
The performances “typically lasted a number of days,” the indictment claims. “Combs and the victims,” the submitting notes, “sometimes acquired IV fluids to recuperate from the bodily exertion and drug use.” And because the occasions continued, the submitting additional alleges, Combs choked, shoved, hit, kicked, and threw objects at individuals. He allegedly dragged individuals by their hair. The bodily accidents took days and typically weeks to heal, in line with the indictment; the broader results lasted for much longer.
That is what “freak offs” had been. That is what Trump was amplifying when he “retruthed” the put up asking Harris, in cheeky all caps, whether or not she had participated in them. Combs pressured individuals into taking part in these occasions, the submitting claims, “by acquiring and distributing narcotics to them, controlling their careers, leveraging his monetary help and threatening to chop off the identical, and utilizing intimidation and violence.” He taped the periods, the indictment alleges, utilizing the recordings as “collateral” to make sure members’ cooperation and silence. Combs additionally turned members’ profession aspirations towards them, the submitting claims, promising them alternatives in change for his or her participation; it additionally asserts that he tried to regulate their look and monitor their well being data.
These are legal allegations of the direst type: claims of abuse each bodily and emotional. They don’t seem to be humorous. They don’t seem to be fodder for glib social-media posts. Though the allegations towards Combs contain intercourse, they don’t seem to be, strictly, about intercourse; they’re about abuse. Assault will not be intercourse. Rape will not be intercourse. The meme that Trump shared ignores these distinctions. In sharing it, he revealed not solely his shamelessness but additionally his ignorance. Ladies have lengthy alleged that Trump doesn’t know the distinction between intercourse and violence. Right now, he proved them proper.
