Well, let’s review some facts.
In 2013, the then-23-year-old Taylor Swift was doing a meet & greet at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, organised by radio station KYGO.
At the event, Swift posed for this photograph with station employee David Mueller and Mueller’s then-girlfriend, Shannon Melcher, another station employee.
Mueller took the opportunity to reach beneath Swift’s skirt and grab her buttocks.
After the photo had been taken and Mueller and Melcher had left the room, Swift informed her mother, the tour manager, the photographer and the members of her security team who were in the room what had just happened.
Her security team went after Mueller, told him what Swift had said he’d done, and escorted him from the venue. They also contacted KYGO and told them that Mueller was no longer welcome at Taylor Swift events.
KYGO conducted its own investigation, and concluded that Swift’s accusation was credible. They terminated Mueller’s employment.
In 2015, Mueller decided to sue Swift for defamation, claiming that he had never touched Swift and that she was making him look bad. He sought approximately $3m in lost income.
Swift, by way of response, counter-sued Mueller for battery and sexual assault. She sought damages, too. She wanted $1. And a jury trial.
In the ensuing 2017 trial, Swift took the stand and gave evidence. Mueller’s lawyer asked her if she didn’t feel slightly bad about causing a man to lose his job. Swift replied:
I didn’t have a reaction to a strange person I didn’t know losing his job... I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.
The judge in Mueller’s case dismissed his suit, saying that there was no evidence that Taylor Swift had got him fired.
The jury in Swift’s case found Mueller liable for assault, and he was ordered to pay her $1.
In late 1995 or early 1996, a journalist named E. Jean Carroll was in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City when she met Donald Trump, who she knew slightly. He asked for her help buying a gift. They shopped for a bit, and then found themselves in a dressing room, where according to Carroll, Trump raped her.
Friends of Carroll would later testify that she had told them about the incident shortly after it happened.
Years later, in 2019, Carroll wrote an article for New York magazine describing the attack. Trump scornfully dismissed Carroll’s account. In November of that year, Carroll sued Trump for defamation.
After some legal to and fro, Carroll sued Trump for battery under a New York law. In May 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, battery and defamation. Carroll was awarded $5m in damages.
After the verdict, Trump went on a Town Hall on CNN and angrily dismissed the case as a ‘fake’, a ‘made up story’, invented by a ‘whack job’.
On the basis of these remarks, Carroll sued Trump for defamation all over again.
The judge issued a summary judgement declaring that Trump’s remarks were indisputably defamatory. The jury was only required to decide on how much damages Carroll should be awarded. The verdict was that Trump was required to pay Carroll an additional $83.3m, over sixteen times the original sum.
A credible definition of stupidity, formulated by the Italian economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla, is that stupidity is behaviour that harms other people and also harms oneself, while intelligent behaviour helps oneself as well as others.
David Mueller groped Taylor Swift’s ass, and then, when his employers fired him, he sued her and lost, and was found guilty of assault.
Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and when she said so, he insulted her in public, was sued, and was found guilty of sexual abuse, battery and defamation. He then insulted her again, and was found guilty of it again.
Taylor Swift is the first billionaire to have earned her money primarily through songs and performances. She has won 14 Grammy awards. She has higher approval ratings among the American public than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden have ever achieved. Her ongoing Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. She has given her tour crew $55m in bonus payments.
I think she’s smarter than Donald Trump.
Edit:
People keep claiming that Taylor Swift is not the first musician to become a billionaire, and that Paul McCartney got there first.
I didn’t say that. I said that she is the first to become one through her own songs and performances, because she is. McCartney earned much of his money through his canny acquisition of other people’s catalogs.
Because of the persistence of ill-informed comments along these lines, I have disabled comments. The source for my assertion is below.
This is why you can’t have nice things, Quora.
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