THE JEAN CARROLL FARCE. When the Press Cheers Lawfare: How Media Coverage Celebrates the Political Weaponization of Courts

THIS NEW WRINKLE IN SCOUTS IRRESPONSIBILITY IS A WIN FOR LAWFARE

The media coverage of the E. Jean Carroll litigation has not simply reported a pair of civil verdicts — it has celebrated them as triumphs of the rule of law. That framing is consequential. It obscures an uncomfortable truth: the Carroll suits were not only litigation over discrete harms; they were a textbook execution of lawfare — the deliberate use of legal processes to achieve political ends — and the press has repeatedly presented each procedural victory as a moral vindication rather than as one move in a strategic campaign.

Start with the demonstrable facts. New York’s Adult Survivors Act opened a short, one-year window in 2022 that allowed long-expired claims to be revived; that window is the specific mechanism that let Carroll press a civil battery claim that otherwise would have been time-barred. Governor Kathy Hochul The first high-profile jury in May 2023 returned a $5 million verdict against Donald Trump. Later proceedings produced an $83.3 million award — a punitive, headline-grabbing sum that the appeals court has since described as “fair and reasonable” given the repeated attacks on Carroll by the defendant. AP News+1

Those are the facts the press reports — but not the full story the public needs. The omission is the larger pattern: statute-shop openings, highly favorable venues, permissive evidentiary rulings, media synchronization, and a willingness to tolerate (if not encourage) public pressure on judges and justices. Together, those moves convert individual complaints into a durable political weapon. That weapon’s triumphs — even when legally defensible — are repeatedly framed by major outlets as vindication of institutions rather than as signs that the institutions are being used as instruments in a partisan campaign.

Consider the timing and architecture of the litigation. The Adult Survivors Act was a politically popular reform intended to correct genuine injustices; yet its short lookback window also created an obvious opportunity for politically resonant cases to be revived and litigated at maximum publicity. The Carroll suits were litigated in New York forums whose juries and local media environment were predisposed to treat allegations of sexual misconduct with seriousness — a fact reporters mention with an approving nod rather than interrogate as an element of forum shopping. Governor Kathy Hochul+1

Then there are the damage awards. A jury’s punitive damages — $65 million of the $83.3 million judgment — read easily as societal outrage translated into dollars. Many headlines treat the figure as an index of moral clarity; that is the celebratory posture. But punitive awards of that magnitude in high-profile political cases do two things that reporting rarely explores: they convert reputational injury into financial attrition, and they raise the cost of political comebacks by making litigation an effective method of economic strangulation. The appeals court’s finding that the damages were “fair and reasonable” is legally significant — and it is the line most outlets emphasize — but an insistence on fairness does not answer the larger strategic question: who benefits from normalizing enormous punitive awards in politically charged civil suits? Reuters

Finally, ask why the Supreme Court’s likely non-intervention is being reported as neutral prudence instead of a strategic opt-out that materially favors one side. The high court has faced sustained protests, threats, and even violence after contentious decisions in recent years; reports have documented increased security concerns for justices. CBS News When the Supreme Court declines to take on a “hot” appeal, that refusal is framed publicly as an apolitical decision to respect lower courts — but in practice it acts as the final node in a lawfare chain: lower-court results are allowed to stand without the symbolic spectacle of the high court reversing a politically sensitive ruling. That outcome both protects the Court and, critically, cements the tactical gains of the litigants who engineered the path to judgment.

Mainstream outlets frequently interpret these moments as the legal system “working” — juries delivering accountability; statutes enabling redress; courts enforcing consequences. Those narratives are not false. But they are partial. They obscure a structural dynamic: law has become a means of attrition intentionally deployed in service of political ends. When the press frames such outcomes as victories for law and civics without examining the practices that produced them, it becomes an unwitting partner in legitimizing lawfare.

Why does this matter beyond political grievance? Because once litigating for political effect is normalized and celebrated, the tactic becomes durable. Future actors will learn the playbook: how to reopen statutes, pick sympathetic venues, marshal media, and use punitive awards to punish rivals. The press’s celebratory framing lowers the political cost of doing so. It encourages replication.

A dispassionate, institutional perspective would cover more than verdicts. Reporters should examine (1) how temporary statutory windows are created and exploited, (2) how venue selection shapes outcomes and public perception, (3) whether extraordinary punitive awards in politically salient cases function more as punishment than redress, and (4) how public pressure on courts (protests, threats) changes judicial behavior in ways that favor litigants who can assemble large narratives in the press. Those are not partisan points — they are structural ones about the health of adjudication in a democracy.

This is not to deny victims a forum or to minimize the legitimacy of many claims; it is, instead, to demand that the press treat procedural architecture and strategic incentives with the same intensity it reserves for verdict-driven moral drama. Celebrating outcomes without interrogating the mechanisms that produced them is not journalism — it is cheerleading. And cheerleading for lawfare will, over time, hollow out the very rule of law the media purports to defend.

If the news media insists on casting lawfare victories as triumphs of justice, it should at least be honest about what is being triumphalized: not only the application of law to alleged misconduct, but the increasingly refined political use of law as a weapon. That’s the headline the public needs — even if many outlets would rather run the easier, morally tidy story.

Sources: reporting on E. Jean Carroll trials and verdicts; summaries of the Adult Survivors Act; reporting on threats and protests directed at the Supreme Court and justices. CBS News+3AP News+3Governor Kathy Hochul+3

ADDITIONAL REPORT. (Frank Bell)

I. The Trial That Could Never Be Fair

No serious observer of American politics can still believe that Donald Trump could receive a fair trial in New York City.It isn’t merely that jurors there lean left — though 85 percent of the city’s electorate voted against him. The deeper problem is cultural saturation: the Stormy Daniels saga, the endless parade of unnamed “accusers,” and half a decade of negative coverage created a civic environment in which impartiality was impossible long before voir dire began.

Legally, venue changes are supposed to protect defendants from this kind of bias.Practically, they don’t. You cannot “screen out” a worldview reinforced daily by every local newsfeed and late-night monologue. The entire ecosystem was already aligned against him.

New York wasn’t the right place for a trial — it was the last place one should have been held.

II. The Swarm, Not the Conspiracy

Critics often ask for proof of coordination among prosecutors, activists, and media figures.But the modern machinery of opposition doesn’t need coordination — only convergence.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Attorney General Letitia James, and a chorus of sympathetic commentators operate within the same ideological current.Each pursues a different case, but all advance the same objective: ensuring that Trump remains in courtrooms instead of on campaign stages.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s something more efficient — a concentrated operational environment in which incentives, ideology, and timing align naturally.Call it distributed lawfare: multiple autonomous actors moving in the same direction without central command.

III. The Press as Amplifier and Adjudicator

The national press, which once served as a check on prosecutorial zeal, has become its loudspeaker.

Every motion, leak, and rumor is elevated to moral theater.Each new case is celebrated as another step toward “accountability,” as if the accumulation of charges were proof of guilt rather than strategy.

Through repetition, the public is conditioned to see legal combat as moral duty.The jury pool breathes that atmosphere; reporters reinforce it daily.Even before Trump entered a courtroom, his conviction in the court of public opinion was complete.

IV. The Supreme Court’s Silence

Normally, the U.S. Supreme Court exists to impose restraint when politics contaminates law.But after years of intimidation — from protests at justices’ homes to the attempted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh — the Court has learned the value of silence.

Declining to hear politically volatile cases is now a survival mechanism.By refusing Trump’s appeal in the Carroll verdict, for example, the justices avoided new security threats — but at a price: they allowed a precedent of procedural warfare to harden into practice.

Non-intervention, in this case, is not neutrality. It’s strategic abdication.

V. How Lawfare Works

Lawfare succeeds when the process itself becomes the punishment — when the defendant is forced to spend time, resources, and credibility defending against endless litigation while opponents claim moral victory.

The Carroll cases demonstrate each component:

• A retroactive statute (the Adult Survivors Act) opened a brief window for civil revival of decades-old claims.

• A sympathetic jurisdiction guaranteed a hostile jury environment.

• Media coverage ensured constant reputational bleed.

• And a reluctant Supreme Court sealed the results through inaction.

It is one of the best-documented examples of domestic lawfare in modern American history — a legal strategy executed entirely within the rules, yet aimed squarely at eroding the spirit of the rule of law.

VI. The Triumph They’re Celebrating

Turn on the news after each ruling and you’ll see journalists hailing these outcomes as “proof that no one is above the law.”But what they’re really celebrating is the success of a method.

The system has learned that you can destroy a political figure through endless, procedurally clean prosecutions.You don’t need evidence of coordination — only the persistence of the swarm.And as long as the press keeps calling it justice, the tactic will be replicated against whoever the next populist happens to be.

VII. The Lesson

The tragedy of the Trump trials isn’t merely what they’ve done to one man.It’s what they’ve revealed about the Republic itself: that public morality can be manufactured through judicial spectacle, that impartiality can be replaced by narrative discipline, and that the highest court in the land can be bullied into passivity.

Lawfare doesn’t destroy the rule of law overnight.It drains it — slowly, elegantly, under the applause of the media that mistakes erosion for virtue.

If the nation continues to treat partisan prosecution as proof of justice, the next defendant won’t be Donald Trump — it’ll be anyone who challenges the approved order.That’s not accountability.That’s political warfare with legal paperwork.

And the press is cheering it on.