The Unprecedented Courage of E. Jean Carroll--She Won!!!!
by Dr. Morgaan Sinclair for PolitiSage
UPDATE: On May 9, 2023, after deliberating just three hours, the jury of 6 men and 3 women found Donald Trump guilty of sexual assault and defamation and awarded E. Jean Carroll $5,000,000 in damages. This is one the bravest people I’ve seen in my lifetime. This is our original article on this incredible woman.
—Morgaan Rhys-Davies Sinclair, Ph.D.
It began with a trickle and became a torrential mudslide that would engulf the life and career of Harvey Weinstein. First to expose him, after his decades of committing rape and sexual battery, were Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan. But secretly, Mira Sorvino had come years before, only to suffer Weinstein’s wrath by the back-channel destruction of her career.
Soon after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story—now immortalized in the film She Said (2022)—more than a hundred actresses, writers, employees and production assistants came forward, among them Annabella Sciorra, Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow, Miriam Haleyi, Rosanna Arquette, Helene Bonham Carter, Cara Delavingne, Claire Forlani, Eva Green, Daryl Hanna, Salma Hayek, Lena Headey, Anne Heche, Lauren Holly, Angelina Jolie, Olga Kurylenko, Madonna, Julianna Margulies, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Lupita Nyong’o, Léa Seydoux, Sean Young, Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff, Lauren Marie Young, Jessica Mann, and Kate Beckinsale.
But that was Harvey Weinstein, and as powerful, vicious, punishing and seemingly unassailable as he was, he was not the president of the United States—which is what makes the courage of E. Jean Carroll so mind-boggling … and inspiring.
Never before has a woman who has been assaulted by Donald Trump had this kind of sheer strength. How many have there been? No one is sure. Nineteen women have come forward with accusations of rape or sexual assault against the former president—and these echo with the ring of truth when we can’t manage to un-see a photograph of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump together and can’t forget the image of Epstein at Mar-a-Lago until his presence became politically dangerous and a threat to the corporate bottom line for Trump.
We have watched uneasily the films of Donald Trump denigrating a beauty queen who’d gained a pound or two and heard others recount how he would walk backstage at pageants and ogle them while they were still undressed.
The Week lists 61 insulting, disparaging, or dismissive slurs against women, among them the oft-quoted, most odious of them all:
I've got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
— Donald Trump
(From a taped conversation with Billy Bush of Access Hollywood, 2005)
A lesser known but far more worrying tweet is the one from 2013, quoted by CNN:
26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?
Essentially, Donald Trump is normalizing rape culture. He is not railing against 26,000 instances of abuse of a woman, he’s normalizing rape. And he is also normalizing an extremely low rate of rape convictions in courts-martial.
But it’s Donald Trump’s sadism that keeps detractors and speakers of truth at bay because what they know—with total, 100% certainty—is that if they come forward, he’ll try to destroy the lives.
First, there’s his philosophy of denial. Specifically with regard to accusations of sexual assault and harassment, Trump told Bob Woodward, in discussing accusations against an acquaintance,
You've got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you're dead. … You've got to be strong. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to push back hard. You've got to deny anything that's said about you. Never admit.
Then the attacks come. When E. Jean Carroll published an account of Trump’s raping her in Bergdorf Goodman in 1995 or 1996, Trump went blitzkrieg ballistic. In published accounts and depositions he slandered E. Jean Carroll with the practiced tactics he honed on other women: dismissal, humiliation, denigration, threat.
Trump accused Carroll of lying that he raped her because “she was promoting a really crummy book.”
He threatened to sue her.
He has called her a “nut job” and a “whack job” and “mentally ill” — and repeatedly characterized her account as “a scam” and “a hoax.”
He has dismissed any possibility that he could have raped her by saying she’s “not my type.”
These are the kinds of statements that led to Carroll’s lawsuit for defamation—as well as for rape. And, as per usual, Trump has learned nothing. On April 26, Trump posted that Carroll’s lawyer was a “political operative”—defamation as she is not. He claimed Carroll’s lawsuit was being “financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist”—defamation again as it is not. And again, he plunged into denial, writing, “This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!”
This new smashmouth diatribe prompted judge Lewis Kaplan to warn Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina that outbursts from Trump may be construed as attempts to influence the jury—a criminal offense.
Today, E. Jean Carroll, the woman who had the spine to bring charges of defamation and rape against a former president of the United States, faces cross-examination from Joe Tacopina in what will be a brutal attempt to achieve the ultimate defamation that would result from the jury finding Donald Trump not guilty.
E. Jean Carroll’s unprecedented courage lies not only in her willingness to speak out and actually have Trump charged but also in risking that in doing so, she opens herself to a siege of the most vicious legal, mental, and emotional kinds—when the level of wounding she has already sustained is unfathomable.
Yesterday she spoke of the damage done to her body and her emotions—and the theft it represented of her ability to engage in loving sexual relationships since.
And this is what she has had the courage to tell the world:
This is a wound that never completely heals. This takes something that cannot be restored. This assaults the body and the heart and the mind—but also the basic trust women have for men and that women have for the world they live in.
This is the tragedy of which Emerald Fennell wrote in her Oscar-winning screenplay Promising Young Woman. The character Cassie describes her friend Nina, whose rape was filmed and passed around. Nina spiraled into a profound depression and eventually committed suicide. Cassie describes to Nina’s rapist what he did to her:
I want you to know what she was like, ok? But she’s so difficult to explain because she was just so completely herself. Even when she was four years old. She was fully formed from day one. Same face. Same walk. And funny like a grown up was funny. Kind of, shrewd. Perceptive. So smart. … And then she wasn’t. Suddenly, she was something else, she was yours. It wasn’t her name she heard when she was walking around, it was yours. Your name all over her. All around her. All the time. And it just ... squeezed her out.
E. Jean Carroll is a remarkable woman and an incredible human being. And when she stands there, on the same platform stood by Sorvino and Byrne and Judd and others—but at a stratospherically more dangerous level—she stands there for every woman. She has already spent almost three decades trying to heal. She has spent every moment since her exposure of Trump being attacked by him, by his son, by his lawyers, and by a MAGA base not unused to misogyny. She has spent every day since then being slandered and having her reputation shredded.
And now she’s won. It will take years or decades for some of the IMMENSE impact of this case to be seen clearly, but it is gargantuan. It is one of the most powerful acts I have ever seen one woman do. And the support around her from other women was spectacular and heartening.
The upshot of this case for me is that I now believe that in dealing the with past, E. Jean Carroll has changed the future for every woman on this earth.
Resources:
https://theweek.com/donald-trump/655770/61-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20457415-promising-young-woman-final-screenplay
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/politics/donald-trump-military-sexual-assault/index.html