Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Tuesday denounced Donald Trump’s lawyer’s assertion that “you cannot rape your spouse,” a defense the attorney made against allegations that Trump raped his former wife.
“Obviously rape can occur within marriage and we need to all be very concerned about the individual rights of everybody, regardless of their circumstances,” Carson told ThinkProgress at a rally outside the U.S. Capitol organized by anti-choice groups seeking to defund Planned Parenthood.
Carson appears to be the first GOP presidential candidate to speak out against Trump’s lawyer’s comments.
According to a Daily Beast article published Monday, Michael Cohen, special counsel to The Trump Organization, defended Trump against allegations that his ex-wife Ivana Trump “once used ‘rape’ to describe an incident between them in 1989.” Cohen has since apologized for his remarks, saying he made an “inarticulate comment — which I do not believe.”
But Cohen has clearly not kept up to date on his case law. Marital rape has been a crime in all 50 states since July 5, 1993 and New York’s highest court held that a marital exemption to the crime of rape is unconstitutional in 1984, five years before Donald allegedly raped Ivana in the state where the couple lived.
While Carson’s assertion may seem obvious, there’s a whole contingent of conservative opposition to the concept of marital rape, including conservative activist Phyllis Schlafy, who notoriously fought against the Equal Rights Amendment, Virginia state law maker Richard “Dick” Black, and former U.S. Rep Todd Akin (R-MO), according to MSNBC.
Marital rape or rape by an intimate partner occurs frequently in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a 2010 survey that nearly one in 10 women had been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime.