Help me out here

Am I wrong or is this insane?

Nothing too terribly much, just something that makes me feel like I’m losing my mind and I wonder if you guys can confirm or deny.

This was a headline at the Washington Examiner yesterday:

Anderson Cooper cuts to commercial after Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll calls rape ‘sexy’

And here’s the lede in John Gage’s story:

CNN host Anderson Cooper moved quickly to a commercial break when the woman who has recently accused President Trump of assaulting her in the mid-1990s suggested that rape was “sexy.”

And here, from several grafs further down in the story itself, are the quotes meant to justify this portrayal:

Carroll described the alleged event between Trump and her as a “fight” rather than “rape.” Cooper responded by saying that most people would likely think of rape as a violent assault, to which Carroll responded that she thinks most people find rape “sexy.”

She said: “I think most people think of rape as being sexy. They think of the fantasies.”

This is not only a virtually anodyne sentiment about American culture — see Molly Haskell, or really just watch any random 24 hours of movies from the 20th Century — it’s also a million miles away from what the Examiner says up top. Carroll didn’t call rape “sexy.” For fuck’s sake, she said she never had sex again after Trump raped her, that’s how unsexy she found it. She noted that other people thought it was sexy.

The Examiner’s treatment is a twisting of the truth so titanically, obviously willful and malicious — only mitigated by copy further down that no one will read — that I’m having a hard time believing no one else noticed. And yet I haven’t seen anyone who has.

Hours later the Examiner doubled down:

Joy Behar defends E. Jean Carroll's use of 'sexy' to describe rape

They got a different factotum, Ellie Bufkin, to write this lede:

Joy Behar said on The View that writer E. Jean Carroll’s use of the word ‘sexy’ to describe rape last night on CNN…

Oy vey.

…made sense when heard in the context of Hollywood films. Behar specifically cited Gone With the Wind, which depicted a forced marital sex between the lead characters.

Of course casual readers of the Examiner — and it’s impossible to imagine any other kind, since carefully reading that piece of shit would probably cause a cerebral hemorrhage — will scan that and think both Carroll and Behar consider Rhett carrying Scarlett up to bed is dead sexy, and yet here was Carroll falsely accusing The Leader of raping her which is something he would never do because she’s “not his type” (i.e. ugly).

This bullshit has been picked up by Tucker Carlson (natch) and other wingnuts — some of whom include the information up front that Carroll was talking about other people and not herself, probably because, hey, might as well now, she’s already been through 24 hours of smears and the readers of such outlets will only see the words “rape” and “sexy” anyway at this point and be made suitably titillated and contemptuous by them.

And now even sympathetic writers are acting as if Carroll did something wrong. Here’s Alaina Demopoulos at The Daily Beast:

Then Carroll handed Trump some ammo. “I think most people think of rape as being sexy,” she mused. “Think of the fantasies.”

Cue Cooper stammering and signaling for a segment break.

What could possibly inspire Carroll's inopportune, uncomfortable tangent on rape fantasies? Oh, I don’t know, maybe we can chalk it up to the stress, lack of sleep, and general emotional mind-screw that could come with accusing a sitting president of rape.

Along with her major obvious truth, Carroll told a smaller obvious truth, and that’s, what, a gaffe? Because it made people uncomfortable? Maybe she would have really spotted the landing if she never mentioned rape at all.

Am I nuts or is this nuts?