Believe the Accuser: The Legal Weapon That Hit Trump in the Carroll Case and OneTaste in Brooklyn
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case and consequently let stand a $5 million civil verdict against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation.
A separate $83.3 million judgment is still on appeal.
Whatever one believes about the alleged encounter in a dressing room, the case deserves a look that the press coverage never gave it.
Consider what the verdict rests on. A claim that surfaced roughly 30 years after the alleged assault Elizabeth Jean Carroll said occurred in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
There was no contemporaneous police report, no physical evidence, no eyewitness.
The standard of proof was not the criminal "beyond a reasonable doubt" but the civil "more likely than not" — the lowest bar the law offers — a standard built for car accidents and contract disputes, and not well suited for allegations of sexual assault decades old.
Under Federal Rule of Evidence 415, a civil plaintiff alleging sexual assault may put the defendant's other alleged assaults before the jury as proof of propensity — the "he did it before, so he probably did it here" inference. The rule requires no prior conviction — not even a finding that the other accusations are true. Unproven allegations may come in as proof of the charged act.
The rule sets no limit on how old those other accusations are. It does not require that they have ever been proven.
The Alleged Pattern
In addition to Carroll's uncorroborated allegation, two other women alleged incidents that were decades old that were never proven in any trial.
The jury in this case was invited to reason from the three women who described an alleged pattern to conclude that Trump did the alleged assault.
Believe the woman; believe the other women; let the accumulated uncorroborated stories replace the old standards of proof.
A man accused of murder is protected from this. The prosecution cannot tell his jury that he killed before, so he probably killed again — not even with a prior conviction.
The law forbids it in murder, in robbery, in fraud.
It is permitted in one category of case: sexual assault. There, and almost nowhere else, a jury may be handed a pattern of other accusations and invited to reason from it to the act.
And these other allegations need never have been proven anywhere — no conviction, no charge, no finding by any court. An accusation alone is enough to put before the jury. The defendant is told in advance, but told what? That he must now rebut a decades-old claim with no report and no record — the kind of allegation almost no one could disprove, because you cannot prove a negative about a night thirty years gone.
Lowering the Bar
Why sex, alone among crimes? The answer is in history.
When Congress created these rules in 1994, as part of the Violence Against Women Act, the argument was that sexual assaults are uniquely hard to prove — no witnesses, no evidence, delayed reports — so prosecutors wanted a tool that suspended normal due process, a law that denies due process required in every other case.
The federal judiciary's rule-making body opposed it, warning it would erode the presumption of innocence. Congress enacted it anyway.
On paper, the rule is gender neutral. It applies to any defendant, man or woman. But it was born of a gendered story — the female victim, the male predator — and that story is what carried it past the due process objections.
The rule was designed to convict guilty men who had once gone free.
But a tool that lowers the bar does not lower it only for the guilty. It lowers it for everyone accused.
The same rule that convicts the true predator makes the false accusation easy. Once a pattern of untested claims can stand in for proof, the accuser who is lying is believed on the same terms as the one telling the truth.
That is the quiet reversal. For three hundred years, the law's guiding rule was Blackstone's: better that ten guilty escape than that one innocent suffer. It erred, deliberately, on the side of the accused, because a false conviction is the state itself doing wrong.
This rule reverses that. It errs on the side of the accusation. And when the accusation is enough, the accusation becomes the conviction — for the guilty man and the innocent one alike.
The Shared Bloodline
The victim-centered approach did not appear from nowhere.
It shares a bloodline with the evidence rules.
Both descend from the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 — the same law that bent the rules of proof also built the offices, the grants, and the training programs that would share a single premise through the next thirty years: that sex crimes are too hard to prove by ordinary due process and the old system failed the accuser.
Due process must give way. Protecting the innocent is not as important as convicting the guilty.
The evidence rules were the first expression of that premise, written into law. The victim-centered approach was the second, written into training. They are not cause and effect. They are siblings — and the family resemblance is unmistakable.
The Doctrine
The training behind the victim-centered approach mandates institutional deference to the accuser's narrative before the facts are tested. The accusation becomes the evidence. The pattern is proof. The vintage of the claim becomes a measure of the courage it took to bring it, rather than a reason to challenge it harder.
A man can be branded and financially penalized in a civil case on a thirty-year-old account propped up by two unproven prior accusations.
Every step is authorized. The unique injustice is totally legal.
The Carroll case is the civil arm of this new ideology.
For the criminal arm, look 30 miles away to Brooklyn, where the same logic—believe the accusation first, test it later, if at all—produced a prison sentence.
OneTaste in Brooklyn
In Brooklyn, a federal jury convicted Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, the founders of a meditation company called OneTaste, of a single count: conspiracy to commit forced labor. Not forced labor. Conspiracy.
There were no chains or locked doors. The federal prosecutors never alleged that the nine adult women "victims" were not free to leave.
The theory was that nine college-educated women stayed and worked for Daedone's company, OneTaste, because leaving meant risking the loss of friendships in the OneTaste community, their jobs, which they loved, their shared communal housing, and their sense of self. Spiritual loss.
Nine women out of 35,000 participants in classes or events of OneTaste, admittedly a sexual wellness, adults-only, educational company, with a legal but controversial practice called Orgasmic Meditation, said they were brainwashed into practicing it.
Part of the brainwashing was, the nine women said, that they experimented with legal sexual practices that included sex without love, which sometimes included multiple sexual partners, even strangers. No violence. Nothing anyone claimed was non-consensual.
They had, in some instances, the same kind of sex men had, without regret.
The women had regret. That was the brainwashing. They consented at the time. They later realized, with a fair degree of government prompting and financial incentives (aka promises of restitution), that they were brainwashed.
No Sex Crime Alleged
No woman alleged rape. There was no sexual assault. In fact there was no sex crimes at all alleged against the founder Daedone, or her head of sales Cherwitz.
It was a forced labor conspiracy. The brainwashing that sex was as free for women to explore as it is for men was alleged as a deep laid conspiracy that Daedone and Cherwitz hatched so that women would work harder for less money to dive deeper into the philosophy, the nature of sex itself making their desire to say no evaporate.
They said yes, voluntarily, enthusiastically, but they should have said no, they later realized.
It is not a coincidence that out of 35,000 participants of which half were men, there was not a single male victim.
It was only women, white women, affluent or middle class, college degreed, who agreed they were victims of brainwashing.
What they said yes to at the time, 10 years later, they realized they were not capable of consent by virtue of being brainwashed.
In effect, the government taught them to say they had been brainwashed. You could extend it to say the government brainwashed them into saying they were brainwashed.
Normally, you would think, like in the Trump case, that uncorroborated accounts of three women would not earn a verdict of $88 million for one of them (it is unknown how much the other two will get for their stories from Carroll.)
You would also think that nine adult women out of 35,000 would not be enough to put Daedone in prison for nine years and Cherwitz for 6.5 years.
But it works. The victim-centered approach really does work.
Harm and Belief
Yes, let us not short shrift this. The nine were harmed. They said they were.
People are harmed all the time. They make mistakes. They do stupid things or later think they were stupid. It seemed smart at the time.
Stupid does not make it illegal. Except in this case, a grand victim-centered approach to criminality. Now it is illegal. Because you can go back in time and call it brainwashing.
This new ideal threatens the freedom of even those who don't experiment with sex and later regret it.
It threatens spirituality. It threatens religion.
It hands the government the tools to decide which teachings are legal and which are the product of brainwashing.
Just as the Carroll civil victory permits retroactive regret with the kind of monetary awards that are normally reserved for people who lose a limb or their entire future, the OneTaste precedent threatens all freedom of religion in this country.
The government chose a philosophy based on sex so that the conservative religions would not see the corollary.
It is not about sex. It is about stamping out undesirable beliefs.
The government chose a sex-based philosophy precisely because conservative religions would not rally to its defense. Because the victim-centered approach is exclusively about sex and women (white women mainly).
But the legal theory does not care what the belief is—only that the state finds it objectionable after the fact.
The Standard of Proof
In the OneTaste case, the judge instructed the jury that "serious harm" includes "psychological, financial, or reputational harm." Any harm.
The government told jurors that "also includes sexual harm."
The government told the jury it need not find that forced labor happened. It only need find that the defendants had conspired to create conditions that might lead to forced labor.
This was a conspiracy case.
In the Carroll case, the believe-the-victim instinct is written into a rule of evidence.
For a plaintiff with no corroborating witnesses, no physical evidence, and a claim that surfaced three decades later, the judgment is staggering—disproportionate to any tangible harm even if the allegation were true.
In the OneTaste case, prosecutors made it criminal.
Both cases won convictions on the shape of the accusation rather than on any proof of an act.
Both began by believing the accuser and calling it justice.
In the Carroll case, the jury heard a defense hamstrung by rules of evidence that allowed the jury to weigh unproven prior accusations as proof of a pattern.
The Reach of the Theory
The victim-centered approach turns psychological pressure and reputational fear into the elements of a crime.
It will not stop at OneTaste.
Replace "orgasmic meditation" with "discipleship."
Replace "the community" with "the congregation."
Replace "enlightenment" with "salvation."
The theory that convicted Daedone and Cherwitz would fit a congregation as easily as it fit a meditation commune, and already in the federal courts they are expanding it to pastors and congregations.
The OneTaste danger is that the state may decide which beliefs are criminal.
The Carroll danger is quieter and broader.
It needs no prosecutor. It is the collapse of the protections that once kept anyone from being ruined by a decades-old accusation.
Two of those protections failed here. The statute of limitations — the rule that claims must be brought while evidence still exists — was suspended, so a thirty-year-old allegation could be filed as if it were fresh.
And the ban on propensity evidence, which protects defendants in every other kind of case, was lifted, so untested prior accusations could stand in for proof of the act.
A Theory of Harm Based on Faith
The arithmetic is grim. A claim old enough that no one could disprove it. A standard of proof set at "more likely than not." A penalty — eighty-three million dollars — of the kind normally reserved for a lost limb or a ruined body.
Generalize that, and any person with a name or a fortune can be financially destroyed on an accusation that time has made unanswerable, believed on the lowest standard the law offers, propped up by other accusations no one ever proved.
It does not take a government. It takes only an accuser, and a rule that has decided the accusation is enough.
For OneTaste, for Daedone and Cherwitz, every element the prosecutors called forced labor — the charismatic leader, the dedicated lives, the teachings that the others who fear to explore or even follow may be less enlightened, and the fear of what leaving might cost to your creature comforts or to your soul — is what every ordinary church, ashram, and seminary teaches.
The fear of damnation is a heavier threat than anything any of the nine adult, allegedly brainwashed women said they feared at OneTaste if they left.
A theory of harm that is based on a believer's faith has nowhere to stop.
It is a fact that a rule that locates the crime inside someone's mind and lets the state decide, after the fact, whose mind was captured, is now a precedent.
The Two Cities
Set the two cases side by side one more time. In Manhattan, the believe-the-victim instinct is now a rule of evidence; a man is robbed of millions on a thirty-year-old account and two accusations no jury ever tested.
In Brooklyn, the same instinct has no rule at all. Two women go to prison on a crime the jury was told it need not find.
One case produced a combined $88 million in judgments — one now final, one still on appeal — exceeding what most plaintiffs receive for catastrophic physical injury, on a thirty-year-old claim with no physical evidence or eyewitnesses.
The other ended in prison for two women who purportedly brainwashed nine adult women who said they loved the teachings at the time.
They are the same case. Both credited the accusation before it was proved. Both let the shape of the story stand in for the evidence.
Both called the accuser a victim before anyone had decided whether a wrong was done — and then reasoned backward from their word alone.
The space between a civil verdict against a president and a prison sentence for two women almost no one has heard of is not as distant as it looks.
It is a step.
The Warning
The brazen rule that took Donald Trump's money and the theory that took Daedone and Cherwitz's liberty are the same rule, the same theory, pointed at different people. That is the warning.
These two cases, studied together, show how the victim-centered approach does not care whose face it is aimed at.
It was designed to believe the accusation. It will believe the next one.
Yours, or your pastor's, or anyone's.
And call it righteous justice while it does.
If you want a picture of the future, don't imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. Picture it arriving speaking the language of care—trauma-informed, survivor-centered, compassionate. That is how a free country talks itself, one step at a time, into deciding that the accused need not have rights, so long as someone, somewhere, can be a victim.
Read more about this criminal theory:
Trump uses the pardon like no president has, with the intended purpose the founders gave it – not for mercy, but to correct injustice. He should do more, not fewer pardons. Alice Johnson’s role of pardon czar is for expressly this purpose.