Is Donald Trump a sex offender? It is a sad commentary that we still have reason to debate this question as it regards the Republican presidential poll leader, and it is back in the news again. A federal jury in Manhattan found in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll on her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in Bergdorf Goodman in the mid 1990s, but rejected Carroll’s claim that he had raped her.

Trump has been accused many times of various kinds of sexually predatory behavior. There are reasons to believe, given his demeanor, comments, lifestyle, and the sheer number of these accusations, that there is fire behind the smoke. As I commented even before we saw the Access Hollywood tape or learned about the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments: “As a thrice-married admitted adulterer, Trump’s history doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in this area, from bragging about bedding married women to his comments to Howard Stern about watching Paris Hilton’s sex tape to his weird habit of commenting on the sex appeal of his own daughter to embracing convicted rapist Mike Tyson to defending Bill Clinton himself in his sex scandals in the 1990s, just to pick a few examples.”

But there are also reasons to suspect that Trump is a fat target for false accusations motivated by some combination of political grievance and the lure of easy money. As is so often the case with Donald Trump, he is so shrouded in untruth and blarney and brings out so much of the worst in his defenders and antagonists alike that getting at the truth seems futile.

There is what we know, and what we merely suspect. As to what we know, I’ve long insisted that — while every alleged victim of sexual assault or abuse deserves a hearing — grave charges still demand a careful weighing of the evidence, whether those be Carroll’s claims against Trump, or prior claims against Trump, or Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, or Tara Reade’s accusation against Joe Biden, it was hard to come by persuasive proof. (The Kavanaugh claim was the weakest of these, given that her story was not backed up by her friends, and there was never any other evidence that she ever even met Kavanaugh.)

In Carroll’s case, I had to some extent written the issue off after her erratic behavior in some public interviews, although she had more corroboration at trial (in terms of people she told of the incident contemporaneously) than it appeared when she first accused Trump. But while some Trump defenders argued that Carroll’s story must be wholly false if it wasn’t wholly true, that’s not necessarily the case. We should always be open to the possibility that a story has been embellished. That is where the jury seems to have come out.

It’s not a crazy way of looking at things. As bad as it is to force yourself on a woman and kiss and grope her against her will, there is still an additional line crossed from that to rape. Trump seems very much like the kind of man one can picture doing the former.

Yes, we’ve all seen too much Trumpian bluster to treat the Access Hollywood tape as gospel truth and a confession rather than braggadocio: As I noted at the time, “we should have learned by now that just because Donald Trump says something doesn’t make it so. That’s doubly true when Trump is in full Trump mode, trying to impress another man with tales of what an alpha-dog Master of the Universe he is.” But it tracks with his demeanor and character, and it tracks as well with the bulk of the accusations made against him by various women. On the other hand, while I can’t rule out the possibility that Trump is the kind of man who would rape a woman, I’d need more evidence to be persuaded that he actually had.

But again: All of this is bad enough. It should have been bad enough to finish Trump’s political career years ago, just as it should have been bad enough to finish Bill Clinton’s career and Ted Kennedy’s career — and I still maintain (as I explained here and here and here) that the Clinton-era “moralizers” were right, the Clinton-era “compartmentalizers” were wrong, we would never have had voters sticking by Trump if they hadn’t first seen Clinton get away with it all, and we would never have had the “MeToo” reckoning if the Clintons had been in the White House in 2017. It’s not too late for voters to finally have enough of these sorts of men as our leaders.