CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin on Tuesday tore into Donald Trump Jr. for his recent remarks about how men are affected when they are accused of sexual assault, with Toobin saying that someone who commits assault in high school should have their life “ruined.”
“If you sexually assault someone in high school, your life should be ruined,” Toobin said on CNN’s “New Day” while discussing the allegations against Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh.
{mosads}Toobin also mocked Trump Jr., jokingly saying that the president’s eldest son cries himself to sleep every night “over the fate of white men in America.”
Trump Jr. recently told DailyMailTV that the national conversation around sexual misconduct and the #MeToo movement makes him fear more for his sons than his daughters.
“When the other side weaponizes it against men and says 40 years later we can bring it up, you did something in high school that no one remembers, it can disqualify you from every doing anything again, it really diminishes the real claims,” Trump Jr. said.
Toobin said the concern should be more for the alleged victims like Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when they were both high school students.
“How about the lives of the women who were sexually assaulted in high school?” Toobin asked. “How about 15-year-old Ms. Blasey — she wasn’t Ms. Blasey Ford in those days — how about her life? All this whining about the poor plight of white men is ridiculous.”
Trump Jr. fired back on Tuesday afternoon, blasting the legal analyst on Twitter as a “partisan liberal hack” and a “scumbag.”
“What’s actual garbage is a partisan liberal hack who masquerades as a journalist on @CNN, attacking me for loving & caring about all my children,” Trump Jr. wrote. “It’s scumbags like @JeffreyToobin, who don’t believe in the presumption of innocence that cause me to worry for my sons.”
The Washington Post on Monday published a compilation of Republican men speaking about how they feel they are in danger of being falsely accused in the #MeToo era.
The president — who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women — defended Kavanaugh on Monday.
“The trauma for a man that’s never had any accusation — he’s never had a bad statement about him,” Trump told reporters. “It’s unfair to him at this point. What his wife is going through, what his beautiful children are going through is not describable.”
Kavanaugh has been in the center of a national conversation around the #MeToo movement after three women publicly accused him of sexual misconduct.
– Updated at 4:53 p.m.