I’m not entirely comfortable airing people’s marital dirty laundry, especially when it’s twenty years old or comes from contentious divorce proceedings. It’s even worse if we only know the details because the police erroneously released the report to the media. This case is unusual, however, because it involves the “CEO” of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and because that man makes a living out of peddling lies and smears.
So, despite feeling queasy about any appearance that I’m sinking to his level, I’ll go ahead and discuss some of what we’ve learned. Most of the focus is on an incident of domestic violence. The episode happened in Stephen Bannon and his wife’s driveway when they began to argue over their finances. She spat at or on Bannon as he was seated in the driver’s seat of his car and he reacted violently by grabbing her arm and attempting to drag her into the car over the door. At some point he caused some minor injuries to her neck. When she attempted to use a cell phone to call the police, he forcibly took the phone from her, threw it across the room, and broke it. These are obviously her allegations and her side of the story, but the police believed her and since they could see her injuries, they arrested Bannon and charged him with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness.
If this were all there were to this story it wouldn’t be very interesting. But there’s more.
The charges were dropped because the prosecutors could not find Bannon’s ex-wife and she did not show up in court. In a post-divorce proceeding the next year, she explained why she never showed up to testify against her husband:
The couple divorced in 1997. In a court filing after the divorce, Bannon’s ex recounted the alleged domestic violence incident, saying that Bannon “became physical with me and grabbed me by the throat and arm.”
“I took the phone to call the police and he grabbed the phone away from me throwing it across the room, and breaking it as he screamed that I was a ‘crazy f—–g c—t.”
According to Bannon’s ex-wife, police arrived and photographed her neck and arm “and took a police report.”
She claimed that Bannon and his defense attorney then told her to leave town so she couldn’t testify against him.
“Respondent told me I had to leave town. That if I wasn’t in town they couldn’t serve me and I wouldn’t have to go to court. He also told me that if I went to court, he and his attorney would make sure that I would be the one who was guilty.”
Ten years later, she elaborated in another court filing:
In the 2007 filing, which involved a modification to their divorce agreement, she said she left town with their two children and didn’t return until “the attorney phoned me and told me I could come back.”
“Because I was not present at the trial, the case was dismissed.”
Reporters have contacted this lawyer, Steve Mandell, who denies he told her to do anything of the kind. Of course, I assume he would be disbarred or worse if he admitted it.
But this is still not the end of the story because in that same 2007 divorce settlement modification, she made another alarming allegation:
Bannon’s ex-wife also claimed in that filing that that Bannon objected to his daughters attending a prestigious West Los Angeles prep school because, she said, “he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”
Now, through spokespeople, Bannon has denied all of this and even claimed that “Mr. Bannon and his ex-wife and his children have a great relationship.”
And, I guess that that is possible. After all, another nine years have elapsed since she volunteered to a court that her husband is an anti-Semite. Maybe she isn’t feeling so uncharitable these days.
I’m also aware that people and their lawyers make all kinds of statements in divorce proceedings, especially when there are money and custody issues at play. Just because something is alleged doesn’t make it true.
What I know for certain is that this is all now out in the public square and the Trump campaign will take a hit for putting a guy in charge who appears to have committed some rather serious crimes to avoid being held accountable for fighting and injuring his wife. They will have the mark of anti-Semitism attached to a campaign that was already struggling with a reputation for every other form of bigotry known to man.
As for Donald Trump, the allegations his ex-wife Ivana has made against him in court filings and privately are extremely troubling.
Ivana Trump’s assertion of “rape” came in a deposition—part of the early ’90s divorce case between the Trumps, and revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.
The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene. After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.
“Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.
What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.
“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”
Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there.
“As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.
Donald Trump has previously denied the allegation. In the book, he denies having had the scalp reduction surgery.
Trump’s lawyer said simply, “…by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse…It is true, you cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”
So, whatever else you can see about Donald Trump and his campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, they share the ability to make their ex-wives say some really horrible things about them.
I can’t say these incidents happened the exact way they have been portrayed, but let’s just ask ourselves what it means if they’re both basically accurate depictions of how these men will treat women, including women that they love or have loved?
I think we can see why these two men get along and want to work together.
Shocking to see this on a formerly thoughtful and respectable blog, and also amazing to see the half-assed justification. For shame.
My sources are The Daily Beast (Newsweek) and NBC News.
Well sourced stories based on legal records and divorce proceedings versus innuendo and conspiracy garbage pushed by the Right and some mainstream journalists. I get the Clinton campaign doesn’t want to “go there,” but there’d be no hesitation on the Trump side. Given the years in the late 90s and early 2000s when lots of people on the Left complained about Dems holding back, not fighting, looking like wimps (see Gore and Kerry) while being visciously slandered, I think it’s great that the Clinton campaign is now calling out Trump’s racist inclinations and associations explicitly. If the campaign does a little dark art execution in the press on these improprieties is fine by me.
dataguy, for heavens’ sake, Trump called Roger Ailes a great guy even after Ailes was suddenly chased out of Fox News by serial sexual harassment charges, and Trump disparaged the women who filed those charges. Trump openly claims to have a relationship with Ailes to this day.
And have you gotten a load of the despicable treatment women get from writers for Breitbart News? Trump hired as his campaign CEO the man who is primarily responsible for the moral sewer that is Breitbart News.
Spare us the hankies.
I would think finding out if our potential president is a rapist who hires abusers would be relevant. I wonder why that doesn’t matter to you?
I guess Trump will have to call Hillary an anti-semite now, so the media will be able to call it a wash.
I don’t know about anything else and case law differs from state to state but:
If you get into an altercation, someone ends up with visibe wounds and someone gets carted away it WILL BE the person who doesn’t have visible wounds. This is SOP everywhere I’ve ever been (MA – CA, MN-AL) including Texas.
(This assumes the altercation involves people of the same color.)
Botched plastic surgery to hide baldness, well there’s a unique explanation for the pet scalp weasel he carries around.
John Galsworthy – A Man of Property published 1906.
So, culturally marital rape has been a real thing for 110 years. It took a long time for the law to catch up, beginning in the mid-1970s and the marital rape exemption to rape laws was withdrawn in all fifty states by 1993. (Struck down in 1984 by the NY SC.) Thus, Trump’s lawyer is about as competent as Trump and everyone else that he hires.
That said, there are a couple of reasons to suspect Ivana Trump’s claim. NY isn’t a community property state and their divorce was contentious because she didn’t want to divorce him. The truth? Only those two know what it is.
No reason to doubt the 1996 physical abuse of Bannon’s then wife (or that he’s lousy marriage material as he has at least three ex-wives). Or even that she was advised to leave town so that the charges would be dismissed, but doubt that’s a complete retelling of the advice and why she did so. And apparently his ex-wife didn’t file for a TRO which is standard in domestic abuse cases and routinely issued. (A CLETS-TRO wasn’t enacted until months after they were divorced.) OTOH, reporters that claim to have read divorce filings tend not to be all that accurate their reports; so, perhaps the TRO was overlooked in the write-up. As the ex-wife filed for divorce in 1997, doesn’t seem credible to refer the 2006 court filings as “divorce papers.”
Booman writes:
I can’t say that these incidents happened exactly way as have been portrayed, either. There are too many possibilities…wives angling for a payoff, lawyers angling for a payoff, political opponents angling for a win, etc. But I can certainly say 3 things that are distinct possibilities:
1-These two men have bad taste in wives.
2-Their wives have bad taste in husbands…unless of course they were just angling for a payoff out front, in which case they have the bad taste to be marital whores.
and
3-They have bad taste in political enemies…not that any political enemy or ally at the highest ends of this thoroughly rotted out system is going to be any kind of savory character. If they had any character at all they wouldn’t have had enough success in the system to have a possibly useful amount of power.
So it goes.
Down like a motherfucker.
AG
“…including women that they love or have loved.”
At this level of controller hustle, what’s love got to do with it?
Tina Turner knew.
Ike Turner: Why I Beat Tina
Beat…errrr, ahhhhh, I mean…bet on it.AG
what’s with BroD posting comments in diary format and taking up a large % of the space in the side menu? there’s no way to downrate the diaries to get them off the side menu.
oh fer chrissakes–I just don’t believe any married man who claims, directly or by implication, that he’s never gone through a similar “drive way” incident. He threw the phone across the room–or wait, wasn’t it out on the drive way?–are you kidding me? Eric Clapton once smashed an incredibly figured, precious handmade 12-string guitar against a wall and beat it to smithereens (he left the neck in tact and later brought it to the luthier, who, shocked and saddened, nonetheless built a brand new guitar around it) during an argument with his significant other of the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUSzL2leaFM
I’ve never had a “driveway” incident, but then I never called my wife a c*nt, broke her cell phone, got arrested for bruising her arm and neck, had my lawyer threaten her, forced her to leave town and not show up for court, or told her we can’t send our kids to a certain school because there are too many Jews there.
But if Eric Clapton once got mad at a woman and smashed his guitar, I guess who cares, right, genius?
I know what this reminds me of: Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal, with its extensive discussion of Bill Clinton’s policy betrayals and Obama’s cool, professional continuance of same. (And of course, there’s not a syllable about Hillary smashing porcelain in the WH.) One factor Frank focuses on as enabling/furthering their rejection of egalitarianism and concomitant devotion to and fawning on the professional and “creative” class: “the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity”.
Did you ever run into Paul Fussell back in Princeton? I recall that in book Class there was a discussion of driveways, and he noted that when you can’t even find someone’s driveway, you’re dealing with the “up and out-of-sight class.” There’s Bannon’s sin–he hasn’t quite made it yet.
Are you trying to imply that assaulting your spouse is normal behavior?
Are you completely fucking mad?
Married 20 plus years. Never had a “driveway incident”, never destroyed any of my wife’s property, never threw objects at her, never called her demeaning names, threatened her, etc. And I am far from alone. Disagreements, arguments, feelings of anger are part of the territory, yes. But there are certainly ways of expressing those without resorting to violence or threats thereof. If these incidents were so danged common as to constitute the experience of every married male on the planet, I would have expected practically every neighborhood I had ever lived in to be noisy indeed. Whatever. Not buying it.
Thanks friends, and humble apologies for not being clear or consistent enough. So, a wee clarification: surely what this is really about is not what lesser mortals do or don’t do on their driveways; it’s about feeling SUPERIOR to the misguided and those caught in whatever ugly passions of the moment.
And not to lose the forest for the trees–this is about politics. Shortest Thomas Frank (in “Listen, Liberal”): overall, the Democrats have given up brothers and sisters, fellow workers and human beings, for a politics of success, of professional, creative, and moral superiority. It will fail for many reasons, and as night follows day, will never overcome the resentment it provokes.
How many times do I have to say that one political party chose ECONOMIC TREASON against this country, January 20, 2009, in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression?
………………………………….
How GOP austerity helped create Trump
The conservative media can’t stop complaining that we’re in the midst of the worst recovery since World War II — despite the fact that it’s likely that more private sector jobs will be created in President Obama’s second term than have ever been created in four years under any Republican.
But conservatives aren’t complaining, they’re bragging.
A little-noticed report from the Economic Policy Institute earlier this month should have been national news, but was drowned out the sturm und drang of the campaigns and low-grade trauma generated by Donald Trump’s constant toxic mix of abuse and gaslighting.
Here’s the conclusion EPI came up with as it examined the role government investment has played in the last four recoveries:
The recovery since 2009 has been historically slow, and the disappointing pace can be explained entirely by the fiscal austerity imposed by Republicans in Congress.
Some in the progressive/liberal movement have held the President almost entirely to blame for our slow economic recovery.
It’s a willfully evasive reading of legislative, political and electoral history which excludes nearly all facts to the contrary.
It’s infuriating. It doesn’t serve the goals of the progressive movement. It makes it more likely that economic inequality will increase further.