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 girls, of sexual misconduct. He has denied every cost. He has additionally bragged about assaulting girls and getting away with it.
One would possibly assume, then, that he would favor to keep away from sexual violence as a marketing campaign difficulty. However Trump has not often let information get in his approach—and because the 2024 presidential election attracts close to, he has been looking, ever extra desperately, to increase his stock of assault traces in opposition to Kamala Harris. And so, earlier at present, the previous president shared a meme on Reality Social: a picture, based mostly on a years-old and closely doctored picture, purporting to indicate 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 way in which 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 mistaken too—in a approach that reveals nothing about Harris’s conduct however the whole lot 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 sequence of coerced intercourse acts that Combs allegedly organized, watched, and recorded. They concerned “extremely orchestrated performances of sexual exercise”—with girls in Combs’s community and with male intercourse staff. In addition they allegedly concerned manipulation and bodily hurt.
The performances “generally lasted a number of days,” the indictment claims. “Combs and the victims,” the submitting notes, “sometimes acquired IV fluids to get better 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 generally 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 submit asking Harris, in cheeky all caps, whether or not she had participated in them. Combs pressured individuals into collaborating 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 classes, the indictment alleges, utilizing the recordings as “collateral” to make sure individuals’ cooperation and silence. Combs additionally turned individuals’ profession aspirations in opposition to them, the submitting claims, promising them alternatives in trade for his or her participation; it additionally asserts that he tried to regulate their look and monitor their well being data.
These are prison allegations of the direst type: claims of abuse each bodily and emotional. They aren’t humorous. They aren’t fodder for glib social-media posts. Though the allegations in opposition to Combs contain intercourse, they aren’t, 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 in addition his ignorance. Girls have lengthy alleged that Trump doesn’t know the distinction between intercourse and violence. Right now, he proved them proper.
