Where the Shame Lies

First of all, Maria Wright (letter Feb. 13) please try to read more carefully before judging. I did not say E. Jean Carrol was raped; she said it in court.

Look it up on Youtube and you can nd any number of snippets where she says, “I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back.”

Second, when she wrote about it in her book in 2019, Carroll said that, “on her way out of the store she ran into Trump and he asked for help buying a gi for a woman. A er she suggested a handbag or a hat, the two reputedly moved on to the lingerie section and joked about the other trying some on. Carroll said they ended up in a dressing room together, the door of which was shut.”

As an aside:

Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s “Ask E. Jean” column appeared in Elle from 1993 until 2020. Widely read, it was acclaimed for Carroll’s opinions on sex, her insistence that women should “never never” structure their lives around men, and her compassion for letter-writers experiencing di cult life situations. I guess she was not smart enough to give herself advice like: don’t go into a dressing room to discuss lingerie with a man you just met!

ird, you say that I do not believe in the justice system. You are correct, I sometimes have my doubts, because in my letter (Feb. 9) I pointed out that Trump has been brought to trial, but Joe Biden or Bill Clinton have not. Is that justice? And just for the record, I am neither a Trumper nor a Biden fan.

Let me state very clearly here, that I agree with you that rape and sexual assault are acts that scar a woman for life. ey are both acts that I feel should be punishable by, at minimum, life in prison without parole. But if you look at history, speci cally California’s rst woman Chief Justice Rose Bird and her liberal-leaning decisions, it is hard to believe in our justice system. I fought hard and spoke my mind to anyone I could at the time when she made her ruling about sexual assault in the People v. Caudillo case.

Instead of ghting to change a law, she just caved into it: “I nd I am compelled to sign the opinion of the majority since the legislative history of Penal Code section 461 indicates that the Legislature intended that rape per se could not be deemed ‘great bodily injury’ ... e o enses committed by appellant on the victim in this case were ‘outrageous, shocking, and despicable,’ as the majority state ... However, personal repugnance towards these crimes cannot be a legitimate basis for rewriting the statute as it was adopted by the Legislature.”

Look up Penal Code 261 and you will see it has not changed, even now, except for some age variations. ree to eight years in prison and register as a sex o ender.

So Ms. Wright, accuse me of not believing in our justice system because it is true, but don’t accuse me of saying something that is not true. She said she was raped, not me.

“Shame on me?” I, respectively, would hope you would reconsider where the shame lies.

Ron Perry Canyon Country