Scofflaw Trump is a defaming menace to America

As former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump found himself on the hook for another $83.3 million for continuing to defame E. Jean Carroll following a jury’s verdict last year ordering him to pay her $5 million for doing that decades after sexually assaulting her, he responded in character by continuing to defame her.

After walking out of her lawyer’s closing argument, he whined on social media that her story about him forcing himself on her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in the 1990s was a “Hoax” — quite possibly setting himself up for still another huge payment from a future third jury.

This couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy, by which I mean a guy who’s spent his life bragging about having his way with women and who talks endlessly about using the law to lock up his real and perceived enemies.

The question, as Trump will have to either put up the money while he appeals the jury’s verdict or find a bank willing to front it for him, is if his mouth has finally written a check that his ass can’t cash.

Or will he keep getting away with this stuff by winning another presidential election and becoming, in effect, too big to sue while ignoring a nearly $100 million judgment explicitly intended to stop him from continuing to defame Carroll the way a scofflaw would sneeze at speeding tickets?

About “scofflaw,” that most American portmanteau turned 100 years old this month.

As Britt Peterson detailed in a 2014 Boston Globe essay drawing from Ammon Shea’s book “Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravations,” the word was coined by two different winners of a contest sponsored by a cheerfully eccentric second-generation moneybag and vice president of the Massachusetts Anti-Saloon League with the memorable name of Develvare King.

Three years into the prohibition established by America’s 18th and most idiotic constitutional amendment, King, son of Granite Trust Company President Theophilus King, offered $200 — or what would be nearly $4,000 today — of gold for “a word which will stab awake the conscience of the drinker [and] the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is, in the words of President Harding, ‘a menace to the republic itself.’ ”

Two different people from Massachusetts split the prize after submitting “scofflaw” in a contest that supposedly drew 25,000 submissions — including such losers as “wetocrat,” “boozshevik” and “sliquor” — from people in every state and several other countries.

The winning word was an immediate hit, inspiring cartoons, commentary and even a poem by a New York Sun columnist including the verses

A scofflaw cop is on the beat;

He’s on a scofflaw force

And when he sees a scofflaw fete

He scoffs his share, of course

It wouldn’t do to make arrests Of scofflaws small or great,

For in the court the scofflaw’d find A scofflaw magistrate

After the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment, the neologism seemed to have had its day, with H.L. Mencken eulogizing it three years later in his 1936 edition of “The American Language”:

“The word came into immediate currency, and survived until the collapse of Prohibition.”

But by the time Develvare King — who later tried to popularize Esperanto as a second language — died in 1964, the word his contest coined had revived.

And it had evolved, referring as it does today to car owners who didn’t pay their tickets, along with what one article that year described as such “scofflaw activities as jaywalking, filching dimes from pay telephones, walking on forbidden grass, walking a dog without a leash ... refacing walls or public monuments or finagling with the income tax.” Trumpy!

When New York, then the largest state, repealed its own prohibition law in 1923, that didn’t change the Constitution or make booze legal here. But it did mean that just 250 federal agents were left to enforce a law New Yorkers had already largely rejected. By one count, 13,000 indictments under the state law had led to only 18 convictions.

Those breakdowns — between federal and local law, and between the government’s rules and the people’s actions — led President Harding to deliver a speech addressing the existential issue, one that’s pressing again today, of “whether the laws of this country can be and will be enforced” within its states before absurdly defining “lawless drinking as a menace to the republic itself.”

A century later, making an unrepentant scofflaw like Trump commander in chief again really would be a menace to the republic itself.

Siegel (harry@thecity.nyc) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.

Ihonestly hadn’t thought about the image in a very long time, mercifully. It’s been 12 years since it first hit the internet, and I’m happy to say I — and everyone else — have moved on. But I was 33 years old when Hustler, the Larry Flynt smut rag, published what we’ve come to know now as a deepfake image of me ... with a penis in my mouth.

The accompanying headline read, pointedly, “What Would S.E. Cupp Look Like with a Dick in Her Mouth?”

I was apparently targeted by Flynt for the sin of being a conservative woman. “Her hotness is diminished,” the piece read, “when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood.”

I was on set at a TV network when a friend called to tell me about the very graphic image of me that was now circulating. What happened immediately was a mix of panic and nausea. How many people are going to see this? How many are going to think it’s real?

Then came the awful task of telling my colleagues and bosses the humiliating story. I had to call my parents and family members. I called other employers I worked for. All were sympathetic, of course. But that didn’t make it any less horrifying. I had protected my reputation doggedly, and now I was having to tell people I respected that I was somehow in Hustler.

I got a ton of support, not only from my employers, but from the women at “The View,” as well as Gloria Steinem, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood, to their great credit.

But despite the support, I actually felt worse as time went on. I felt dirty and ashamed, as if I’d actually done the thing I was shown doing. I was sick at the thought of anyone seeing me that way, and worried that one day my future children would see that somewhere in the bowels of the internet.

Back then, it was defended as an issue of free speech and satire. Flynt, who had won many a lawsuit over these sorts of things, was defiant, saying, “As the result of our publishing an ad parody of political pundit S.E. Cupp that depicted her having oral sex, the prudish and delusional right wing has accused me and my magazine of being sexist and waging a war on women. That’s absurd.”

Of course, that’s exactly what it was, and it was intended to degrade and shame me. He went even further, saying, “Find another horse to beat. We don’t know anything about Ms. Cupp’s personal life, but we do know that oral sex is practiced by the majority of adult Americans, both male and female.”

In other words, the image we manufactured is probably not all that fake.

This awful chapter came rushing back to me with deepfakes of Taylor Swift, generated by artificial intelligence, circulating on social media. They showed her in graphic, sexualized positions at a Kansas City Chiefs game.

While she benefits from being famous, so her fans presumably know they’re fake, many others perusing the web might not — or don’t care if they are. Swift hasn’t spoken about them yet, but I can only imagine how she’s feeling.

These images are a horrific violation of a woman’s body, integrity, and privacy, and they can have a very deep impact on a woman’s psyche and self-worth.

That it’s happening to a massive celebrity like Swift is likely no consolation for the thousands of teen girls and young women it’s also happening to — girls and women who have no public recourse and perhaps no resources to fight them or prove to friends, family, and employers that they are not real.

Online bullying, including revenge porn and images like these, has led to a plethora of high-profile suicides amongst adolescent girls, and at least 13% of all adolescents have made serious suicide attempts because of cyberbullying.

Deepfake porn makes up 96% of all deepfakes, almost exclusively targeting women.

Rep. Joe Morelle has authored the bipartisan Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. “Deepfake pornography is sexual exploitation, it’s abusive, and I’m astounded it is not already a federal crime,” he said.

HR3106 would prohibit the non-consensual disclosure of digitally altered intimate images, which makes the sharing of these images a criminal offense, and creates a right of private action for victims to seek damages.

If this had existed 12 years ago, I might not have had to endure the humiliating experience of being sexually exploited, shamed, and then told dismissively and callously to “find another horse to beat.”

I survived that experience, but not every woman will. It’s time to end this assault on women — pass HR3106.