Opinion by Ruth Marcus: E. Jean Carroll finally gets her day in court. We have become so inured, so numb, to stories about Trump’s behavior that it is tempting to minimize the case.
We did, but we need to hear it again, and to remind ourselves of how far Trump has dragged us down into the gutter with him, reduced to his level of tawdry entitlement. The account being heard by a Manhattan jury is not only about a former president — it is also about a man who, by all measures, seems poised to claim his party’s nomination a third time.Trump, Carroll said, “shoved me so hard my head banged” against the dressing room wall.
Carroll is far from the perfect plaintiff. She can’t precisely pin down the date of the alleged encounter. She didn’t report an assault — indeed, when she called a friend to relate the incident right after leaving Bergdorf’s, Carroll was laughing. “He raped you. He raped you, E. Jean. You should go to the police,” the friend, writer Lisa Birnbach, told her.
But if there is anything we’ve learned in the last three decades — since Anita Hill, since #MeToo — it is that perfection is both uncommon and unnecessary. People follow their harassers to new jobs, and yet they were harassed. They don’t go to police, and yet they were assaulted. Rape is rape, even if it starts with romance or flirtation. The victim inevitably blames herself.“I was ashamed,” Carroll testified about why she didn’t go public. “I thought it was my fault.
And, Trump claims, the encounter never happened. “Does anybody believe I would take a then almost 60-year-old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a very crowded department store, , into a tiny dressing room, and … her,” TrumpDoes anybody not believe it? Carroll’s accusations — and, by the way, she would have been in her early 50s at the time — are consistent with Trump’s pattern of behavior, both self-proclaimed and extensively reported. This is an admitted pussy grabber.
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