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.