via Flickr/iprimages
Does Donald Trump think it's legal to rape his wife, or is that just what his lawyer thinks?
The 2016 presidential race has barely begun, and already things are so out of control that Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is likening one of the Republican candidates to the Show-Me State’s most embarrassing elected official, Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.
See also: Strange Todd Akin Is No Stranger to Us
But McCaskill’s not just going after any ol’ GOP candidate. She has her sights set on Donald Trump, the walking hairpiece with unexpected early leads in the polls who recently came under fire for calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
That name-calling came back to bite Trump after the Daily Beast revealed that Trump’s ex-wife Ivana used the word “rape” to describe a 1989 sexual encounter that left her feeling “violated.” In a divorce case deposition revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, Ivana describes a violent sexual encounter after Trump’s scalp reduction surgery with Ivana’s plastic surgeon went wrong. (Ivana later clarified that she didn’t mean “rape” in a “a literal or criminal sense,” and Trump has denied raping his wife or having scalp surgery.)
Things took a strange turn Monday when Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss to the Daily Beast the best way he knew how.
“You cannot rape your spouse,” Cohen tells the news site. “There’s very clear case law.”
That’s not true. Marital rape has been illegal in all U.S. states since 1993 and in New York since 1984, five years before the incident Ivana described in the deposition.
McCaskill, a former sex crimes prosecutor, couldn’t let that stand. She took to Twitter to wonder why the lawyer for a presidential candidate is 30 years behind the times when it comes to sexual assault case law:
Akin challenged McCaskill for her U.S. Senate seat in 2012, but his campaign imploded when he was asked about abortion and rape on The Jaco Report on KTVI-TV.
“If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” he said, referring to pregnancy.
Akin’s lack of understanding about the human reproductive process banished him to political irrelevancy, despite last year’s attempt at a comeback with his book Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom. Now, his name just gets carted out when someone says something stupid about rape.
Even without his lawyer spouting inaccuracies about sexual assault, Trump will probably find himself in McCaskill’s Twitter crosshairs again. Her tweet comparing the business magnate-turned-television star to a puppy dog following Republican candidate Ted Cruz was retweeted hundreds of times this month.
Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at LToler@stlmag.com or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
