The Gilead Gazette: Smearing Your Accuser is Presidential, AZ Hides Child Abuse, Musk Wants AI Nudes

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every week I read the news about women’s bodies and every week it sounds like it was written by a man who got turned down in 1987 and never recovered. This week: Arizona ruled that churches, not courts, decide whether clergy report child sexual abuse. A congressman accused of domestic violence got a new restraining order and kept Trump’s endorsement. Trump asked the Supreme Court to rule that defaming E. Jean Carroll was part of his job. Elon Musk went to federal court to defend AI that undresses real women. Kansas votes on abortion Tuesday and the word abortion is not on the ballot. Plus a government payout to a man who blockaded an abortion clinic. Let’s get into it.The Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that a church, and not a judge, and not a jury, gets to decide what counts as a confession. Which means two Mormon bishops who knew a man was sexually abusing his own daughter will never stand trial for saying nothing. Paul Adams of Bisbee, a Border Patrol agent, told Bishop John Herrod back in 2011. Herrod called the church help line, which is staffed by church lawyers, and the lawyers told him not to call the police. Adams told a second bishop. Then he told an entire disciplinary council, a room full of people who listened to a man describe abusing his child and decided the matter was handled. They excommunicated him. That was it. That was the consequence. He kept his job, his house, and his children, and he abused that daughter for as many as seven more years and then abused her infant sister too. He was arrested in 2017 because cops in New Zealand found the videos he had been posting online. Nobody in that room ever picked up a phone.On Thursday the court blessed all of it. Vice Chief Justice John Lopez wrote that the First Amendment bars courts from second-guessing how a clergy member applies his own doctrine, so the church defines confession, the church decides whether it has to report, and the court takes the answer on faith. Then the justices volunteered that if Arizona lawmakers ever try to close this loophole, they should expect that law struck down too. Nobody asked them. They just wanted the legislature to know.Ohio Congressman Max Miller’s ex-wife filed a new restraining order against him Thursday, and Donald Trump has no plans to pull his endorsement. Emily Moreno alleges in court filings and police records that Miller threw hot water on her chest and stomach, held a gun to her head, threw her against a wall hard enough to leave a grab mark, and fractured their two year old daughter’s collarbone. The police report has her recounting that same two year old saying “Daddy kill you.” Mother Jones obtained those records and broke the story. Miller denies all of it, sued her for defamation, filed his own domestic violence charge against her, then dropped it this week. Emily’s father is Bernie Moreno, a sitting Republican senator, and when NOTUS asked him whether his party should take Miller off the ballot, he said, “I don’t know.” My dude. That’s your daughter. Republicans spent months demanding Democrats answer for Graham Platner, their Senate nominee in Maine, and when he was accused of sexual assault his own party had him off the ballot in two days. Republicans have police reports, a toddler with a broken collarbone, a deadline of August 9, and a strategy of standing very still.And the man they all take their cues from spent this week asking the Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s eighty three million dollar defamation verdict, on the grounds that publicly calling a woman a liar about her own sexual assault was part of his official duties as president. Official duties. He also had his Justice Department petition the Court to swap the United States government in as the defendant, which would erase the case entirely, because federal law does not let anyone sue the government for defamation. The eighty three million disappears, the jury’s verdict disappears with it, and Carroll walks away with nothing. So the sitting President of the United States, found liable for sexually abusing this woman, is asking nine justices to put it in writing that smearing your sexual assault victim is presidential. FMLElon Musk’s xAI sued Minnesota this week to block a law banning apps that let users generate fake nude images of real people. The law takes effect today, and it fines the company that built the tool five hundred thousand dollars a picture, which is the part Musk cannot live with. His lawyers argue the statute is too broad and sweeps in protected speech, while also stating that xAI already prohibits generating nude images of real people without consent. So he is in federal court fighting for a right his company swears it never uses. The complaint warns exposure could hit fifty billion dollars, a number that only exists if you assume a hundred thousand violations, which means somebody at xAI ran that math on their own product and filed it publicly. Back in March I told you Grok was generating sixty seven hundred sexualized deepfakes an hour and Musk answered with laughing emojis. Governor Tim Walz’s complete public statement was “See you in court, creep.”Speed round. The Justice Department cut a seven figure check to Paul Vaughn, one of the activists Trump pardoned for blockading an abortion clinic in Tennessee, who then sued the government over his prosecution and won, and his lawyers say the other twenty two pardoned blockaders are lined up for theirs. An Idaho crisis pregnancy center, the anti-abortion storefronts Republicans call a replacement for real clinics, talked a hospital across the state line into lending it an actual OBGYN, then handed him a form requiring him to swear to sexual purity and a heterosexual marriage. He refused, and the hospital canceled the whole arrangement the next day. And Kansas votes on abortion Tuesday, except the ballot does not mention abortion. Four years ago Kansans voted to keep it legal, so this time the question is whether to start electing the state supreme court, which is how you replace the judges instead of asking the voters again.Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye. Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe