When E Jean Carroll met her alleged rapist at the revolving doors of Bergdorf Goodman’s department store, the two exchanged greetings: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!” he said. “Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon!” she replied. He asked her to help him find a gift “for a girl”.
It was the mid-1990s and Carroll, a well-versed comedian and the writer of the “Ask E Jean” advice column in Elle magazine, anticipated one of those “hilarious” New York moments. Back then, he was a man who, by her own description, possessed the charismatic and captivating public presence of a “Shakespearean” character.
The reality turned out to be anything but: a shopping expedition which culminated with the aforesaid real estate tycoon allegedly pushing the advice columnist up against the wall, pulling down her tights, and forcibly penetrating without her consent in the department store’s dressing rooms. More than two decades later, Carroll broke her silence in the book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, a pre-publication excerpt of which was published by New York magazine in 2019.
In his customarily loud and grandiose fashion, Donald Trump has denied raping Carroll, accused her of fabricating the assault in order to sell her book, and declared that New York was a “failing magazine” which was “trying to get readership by using [him].”
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Last October, Carroll sued the former US president for defamation and battery, and the court proceedings commenced last Tuesday.
The civil trial and Trump’s quasi-theatrical public reactions - including during his trip to Ireland, when he described it to reporters at Doonbeg as a “political attack” - have stirred up a storm of rape myths and flawed stereotypes which, as Jessica Bennett says in her recent New York Times article, have haunted the US legal system since the first recorded rape trial in 1793. Such myths are arguably universal and the harms they inflict are far-reaching, with recent figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland revealing that more than one in two women and 28 per cent of men have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime.
Perhaps one of the most pervasive of these myths is the belief held by some that they have an unconditional entitlement to sex. This is evident not just in Trump’s flippant denial of more than two dozen accusations of sexual assault, but in his infamous interview with The Hill, and his more recent deposition: “She’s not my type ... She is not a woman I would ever be attracted to.” This statement bears disturbing similarities to what he once said in response to Jessica Leeds, a businesswoman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her on a flight to New York in the late 1970s: “She would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.”
[ In searing detail, Trump’s rape accuser tells her storyOpens in new window ]
Besides serving as a clever deflection, such a statement shows that his own perceived right to sex has less to do with consent and more to do with her so-called “sexual marketplace value”. The rather chilling implication is that if she was “his type,” raping her just might be justifiable. With one off-the-cuff comment, he succeeds in trivialising the crime and the harm he is accused of inflicting, at the same time as crafting a neat soundbite for his audience, one dripping with his signature “political incorrectness”.
The counterattacks directed at Carroll, who has a clear recollection of what she was wearing during the alleged assault but cannot recall the exact date the incident occurred, are not limited to one or two derogatory labels. Trump has launched a classic attack on her character and credibility, relying on the antiquated assumptions of rape culture – assumptions that are at the very heart of the tactics employed by his defence lawyer, Joe Tacopina.
In his deposition, Trump branded her as “mentally sick”, a “liar,” and a “nut job.” “She has no idea what day, what week, what month, what year, or what decade this so-called ‘event’ supposedly took place,” Trump states, while being deposed at the Mar-a-Lago Club at Palm Beach in Florida last year. When Carroll took the stand last week, Tacopina prodded at the fissures in her memory by quizzing her on the minuscule details of an assault that allegedly occurred nearly 30 years ago: Which floor was the dressing room on? How long was she in the elevator for? Did she see Trump through a revolving or non-revolving door?
And yet, Carroll is not the only woman for whom certain details remain hazy. Just as she cannot remember whether the alleged rape took place in 1995 or 1996, I do not recall the precise day of my own rape. My memory of what happened is imperfect; like scrambled-up tape, the precise sequence has been lost. Some of the scenes are blurry and granular, but others are strikingly, inerasably vivid: the smell of his sweat, the sound of his panting, the painful force of his body, and the overwhelming sense, at the time, of serving as little more than a headless object.
Scientists argue that such fragmentation is a feature of traumatic memories, resulting from the peculiar biological mechanisms by which they are encoded and stored in our brains. Regardless of the science, defence lawyers continue to exploit the fallibility of memory in an effort to persuade us of what Trump claimed in his deposition: “The reason she doesn’t know is because it never happened.”
But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it did happen. Under such circumstances, there is yet another pernicious myth that quietly permeates our culture: the myth that non-consensual sexual acts – which account for one in every eight videos on the homepages of Pornhub, XHamster and XVideos – are pleasurable and even sought-after by the victim. During his deposition, Trump alluded to an out-of-context statement made by Carroll in an interview with Anderson Cooper, claiming: “She actually indicated that she loved it ... She said it was very sexy to be raped.”
In 2023, it remains relevant, even necessary, to repeat this one incontrovertible fact: Nobody wants to be raped or secretly enjoys the experience.
Neither silence nor a lack of physical resistance during a sexual encounter can be taken as an absolute indication of a human being’s consent or desire for more. Research has found that tonic immobility – a temporary, involuntary inability to move or, in many cases, speak – is experienced by up to 70 per cent of adult female rape survivors, and by 52 per cent of female survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The absence of a woman screaming is not equal to explicit consent, nor should we permit this to serve as the threshold for distinguishing consensual sex from rape.
Nonetheless, as she testified in court last week, Carroll was asked: “You never screamed for help?”
She replied: “I’m telling you; he raped me whether I screamed or not. I don’t need an excuse for not screaming.”
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article you can contact the Rape Crisis Helpline (1800-778888) or the Samaritans (116123 or jo@samaritans.org)