Alicia Machado told the truth about Trump, and the backlash is terrifying

[Libertine]

Alicia Machado told the truth about Trump, and the backlash is terrifying

The story of Alicia Machado is many things but as it pertains to the presidential election, it is a story about the time Donald Trump smeared a woman and riled up a media circus to spread the gossip. That was back in the 1990s and mostly fodder for tabloids. Now it’s happening all over again – only as part of a presidential campaign.

The irony of course is that we can verify Machado’s story not in spite of Trump but because of him. It was he who made sure her weight-gain and his treatment of her was documented around the world; what’s changed is simply public perception.

This time the line of attack, pushed most aggressively by surrogates and rightwing news outlets, defames Machado as a porn star and murder accomplice, who once threatened to kill a judge and posed topless for Playboy, among other things.

The latest assault came from Trump himself on Friday. Trump called her “disgusting” on Twitter and asked followers to “check out sex tape and past”. Even if the worst of this is true, it doesn’t invalidate anything she said about Trump.

The real headline should be “Woman Who Speaks Truth About Presidential Candidate Endures Second Character Assassination”. The sequence is familiar by now: throughout history, women who speak out against powerful men – as Machado did, for instance, in the New York Times earlier this year – have been subject to a backlash. They’re slut-shamed or cast as crazy, as the Anita Hill movie, Confirmation, recently reminded us.

Instead the Daily Caller went with “Porn Star Campaigns For Hillary Clinton,” while the Daily Mail landed upon “Miss Universe ‘fat-shamed’ by Donald Trump was accused of threatening to kill a judge and being an accomplice to a MURDER bid in her native Venezuela,” noting that it was “unknown if [the] Clinton campaign vetted Machado”. Alex Jones’s conspiracy-theory-mongering site also speculated luridly about the father of Machado’s daughter’s past.

First off, the Clinton campaign confirmed to the Guardian that she is not being paid by them. She’s a volunteer.

The pornography charge is false. The website Snopes, which specializes in debunking online hoaxes, writes that the anal sex clip that turns up on free porn sites under Machado’s name appears to be from the 2004 feature Apprentass 4, which stars another woman. Machado did pose on the cover of Playboy – twice in fact. But if it’s going to be used to smear her character, perhaps it’s relevant to note that so has Donald Trump? The difference is Trump kept his shirt on, but even that was probably only in deference to the preferences of the audience. And speculation relating to her seven-year-old daughter should not be a journalistic enterprise at any respectable media organization.


The Guardian
9-30-16

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...backlash-smear

[pumpagain69]

Hey Lib how many threads are you going to start on this topic? It no way shows how Hilary
has any qualifications to be President. Surely her actual public service record would suggest just
the opposite. At least Trump doesn't have a public service record so the jury is still out on
that one.

[pumpagain69]

Who would have guessed the Lib would make me a hard core Trump supporter
by his shallow posts on this election.