Years Before ‘South Park,’ the Author of ‘Jurassic Park’ Hid Behind the ‘Small Penis Rule’

Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.

Donald Trump and his businesses have reportedly been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits, several of which have found him suing people and organizations for defamation, including ABC, Miss Pennsylvania and his future dining companion, Bill Maher.

Which does beg the question: How come the current U.S. president hasn’t sued South Park yet? After all, the show has gone pretty hard on Trump this season, suggesting that he’s a corrupt sex trafficker who exchanges political favors for compliments and extravagant/phallic gifts. 

Well, some have suggested that the show is safe purely because the cartoon Trump’s genitals are nearly invisible to the naked eye.

As The New Yorker explained, the “Small-Penis Rule” is a “legal strategy” in which writers create a character based on a real person, but “evade a libel suit by giving said character a small penis.” Why? Because anyone suing the writer for copying their life would presumably have to admit that they have minuscule junk. 

This doesn’t totally align with what South Park is doing, since the Trump character is literally named “Donald Trump,” with no effort made to "anonymize” him. Still, it’s possible that the cartoon micropenis has similarly acted as a deterrent to litigation, since the president may not wish for the diminutiveness of his dick to be the subject of a high-profile court case. 

The “Small-Penis Rule” isn’t just hypothetical, some writers have allegedly tried it out, one of the most famous being Michael Crichton, author of bestsellers like Congo, The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park.

Before you go scouring the pages of Jurassic Park for references to Ian Malcolm’s insufficient manhood, the book in question was actually 2006’s Next, a sci-fi novel about experimental genetic research. As reported by The New York Times, the novel contained references to a character named “Mick Crowley,” a "Washington-based political columnist.” This didn’t go unnoticed by Michael Crowley, a Washington-based political reporter who “wrote an unflattering article about Mr. Crichton” that same year. 

Crichton’s Crowley, readers learn, is a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” who sexually assaulted a small child. In addition to this horrific and wildly unnecessary subplot, Crichton specifically pointed out that the fictional Crowley has a small penis. “In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist,” the real Crowley understandably complained. Crowley also accused Crichton of trying to “escape public censure for his literary attack” by hiding behind the “small penis rule.” 

Incidentally, the “unflattering” article that seemingly enraged Crichton had called him out for the book State of Fear, which suggested that climate change was a “massive hoax by scientists and environmentalists,” just like Manbearpig.

While Crowley never actually sued Crichton, he did call the author out publicly, also noting that he was "strangely flattered” by the book. “To explain why, let me propose a corollary to the small penis rule,” Crowley wrote. “Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he’s conceding that the critic has won.”

Of course, the “small man rule” doesn’t apply in the case of South Park vs. Trump, since the smallest man is clearly JD Vance.