Melania: Twenty Days to History, whose unusual genesis (a $40 million bid from Amazon, which was reported to include a roughly $28 million personal fee for #Melania #Trump, & a further $35 million marketing budget) & aggressive rollout across >,300 theaters reveal an awful lot about our #entertainment infrastructure, none of it good.

#Melania #propaganda #complicit #billionaires #media #authoritarianism #dictatorship #MafiaState #EJeanCarroll

(“A big fat #bribe” is how the late-night host Stephen Colbert characterized CBS’s $16 million #settlement to #Trump, shortly before his own #CBS show was canceled; CBS called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.”) And so you can’t see #AskEJean, but you have no end of options this weekend when it comes to watching a “documentary” about the current first lady, Melania: Twenty Days to History

#Melania #propaganda #complicit #billionaires #media #dictatorship #MafiaState #EJeanCarroll

Trump’s lack of impulse control & trigger-happy litigiousness have often collapsed in court, but they’ve had a profound impact on the #entertainment industry. Both #ABC & #CBS have #settled lawsuits served by #Trump rather than fight, seemingly deducing that the cost & capitulation are worth it if they smooth the way for mergers & keep the mercurial & #media-fixated president off their backs.

#Melania #propaganda #complicit #billionaires #authoritarianism #dictatorship #MafiaState #EJeanCarroll

“We all have a lot at stake here. This lawsuit is not just for me; it almost has nothing to do with me,” she explains in one scene to the director, Ivy Meeropol. “It’s for, really, women across the country.” In court, #EJeanCarroll faced lawyers for a former (now reelected) president, making the case, as she puts it, that #Trump was protected by “his scope of employment as president when he called me too hideous to #rape.”

#Melania #propaganda #complicit #billionaires #media #MafiaState

(The jury found #Trump liable for the #SexualAbuse & #defamation of #EJeanCarroll & ordered him to pay $5 million in compensation; Trump’s appeal is awaiting review by #SCOTUS.)

But very few people have seen #AskEJean or even heard of it. #Streaming platforms & #distributors have steered clear of a movie that plainly impugns Trump, regardless of its obvious relevance & engaging portrait of Carroll, whose decision to come forward was resolute in spite of everything she’d face as a result.

In 2019, #EJeanCarroll alleged that #Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s; #Trump promptly denied the allegation while deriding Carroll at rallies & in TV interviews as “totally lying” & “not my type.” #AskEJean follows Carroll as she prepares for the trial, revealing why she buried what had happened for so long; it captures, too, her profound discomfort while she’s badgered during depositions by Trump’s legal team, & her eventual victory.

#media