Slate.com
7.28.15 | Amanda Marcotte
Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen shared some very interesting opinions about marital rape this week. “You cannot rape your spouse,” he told Daily Beast reporters. “There’s very clear case law.”
Reporters Tim Mak and Brandy Zadrozny had contacted Cohen for a response to their story about the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III. Hurt recounts how Trump's ex-wife Ivana Trump, in a deposition during their divorce, described Trump raping her. Trump denied the allegations when the book came out, and Ivana, at the behest of Trump's lawyers, issued a statement saying that she didn't mean rape in “a literal or criminal sense,” but just that she “felt violated.”
Rape is a crime, however; it's not contained by how you feel but by objective questions such as Did she consent to the sex? By that measure, the scene in the book reads like rape. What's more, New York state banned marital rape in 1984, and this alleged incident happened in 1989. If it happened as described, it was rape in both the legal and “emotional” senses.
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