Donald Trump has been held liable for rape. He has been accused, by more than 20 women, of sexual misconduct. He has denied each charge. He has also bragged about assaulting women and getting away with it.
One might assume, then, that he would prefer to avoid sexual violence as a campaign issue. But Trump has rarely let facts get in his way—and as the 2024 presidential election draws near, he has been searching, ever more desperately, to expand his inventory of attack lines against Kamala Harris. And so, earlier today, the former president shared a meme on Truth Social: an image, based on a years-old and heavily doctored photo, purporting to show Harris posing next to Sean “Diddy” Combs. “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT,” the meme asks, “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED WITH OR ENGAGED IN ONE OF PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS?”
The image lies in the way that doctored images typically do: by blending truth and fakery. (The original photo that the meme falsified, taken in 2001, depicts Harris with the talk-show host Montel Williams and his daughter Ashley. The version that Trump shared features Combs’s face grafted onto Williams’s body.) But the meme’s text is wrong too—in a way that reveals nothing about Harris’s behavior but everything about Trump’s.
[Read: ‘I moved on her very heavily']
“PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS” is a reference to a federal indictment unsealed this week accusing Combs of crimes that include sexual abuse, sex trafficking, and, as the Associated Press put it, “shocking acts of violence.” (Combs, having denied many earlier allegations of abuse, pleaded not guilty after being detained earlier this week.) The “freak offs,” as the indictment calls them, were a series of coerced sex acts that Combs allegedly organized, watched, and recorded. They involved “highly orchestrated performances of sexual activity”—with women in Combs’s network and with male sex workers. They also allegedly involved manipulation and bodily harm.
The performances “sometimes lasted multiple days,” the indictment claims. “Combs and the victims,” the filing notes, “typically received IV fluids to recover from the physical exertion and drug use.” And as the events continued, the filing further alleges, Combs choked, shoved, hit, kicked, and threw objects at people. He allegedly dragged people by their hair. The physical injuries took days and sometimes weeks to heal, according to the indictment; the broader effects lasted much longer.
This is what “freak offs” were. This is what Trump was amplifying when he “retruthed” the post asking Harris, in cheeky all caps, whether she had participated in them. Combs pressured people into participating in these events, the filing claims, “by obtaining and distributing narcotics to them, controlling their careers, leveraging his financial support and threatening to cut off the same, and using intimidation and violence.” He taped the sessions, the indictment alleges, using the recordings as “collateral” to ensure participants’ cooperation and silence. Combs also turned participants’ career aspirations against them, the filing claims, promising them opportunities in exchange for their participation; it also asserts that he tried to control their appearance and monitor their health records.
These are criminal allegations of the direst sort: claims of abuse both physical and emotional. They are not funny. They are not fodder for glib social-media posts. Although the allegations against Combs involve sex, they are not, strictly, about sex; they are about abuse. Assault is not sex. Rape is not sex. The meme that Trump shared ignores those distinctions. In sharing it, he revealed not only his shamelessness but also his ignorance. Women have long alleged that Trump doesn’t know the difference between sex and violence. Today, he proved them right.
theatlantic.com