A Trump accuser gets to make her case at last
I can’t really understand why former President Trump wanted to keep his deposition sealed in that lawsuit filed against him by author and former Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
I mean, it’s not as if all the vile things he said about her under oath were any different from all the vile things he’s been saying about her ever since she accused him in her 2019 memoir, “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room back in the mid-1990s after he asked her to help pick out a gift for a woman.
In her lawsuit, Carroll alleges that Trump “forcibly raped and groped” her, and that the attack caused “significant pain and suffering, lasting psychological harms, loss of dignity and invasion of her privacy.”
How has Trump responded? “I’ve never met this person in my life,” he said after an excerpt of her book ran in New York magazine. “She is trying to sell a new book; that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
The first disavowal is especially Trumpian in its dishonesty. In the prologue of her memoir, there’s a 1987 party photo of Carroll and her thenhusband smiling and talking animatedly to Trump and his then-wife, Ivana.
No matter. In the unsealed deposition, Trump calls Carroll “a total liar” and a “wack job” and accuses her publisher, HarperCollins, (which published his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s book) of being “radical” and “left-leaning.” He says he would never rape Carroll because “this woman is not my type!” He threatens to sue everyone from Carroll to her attorneys “very strongly” after the case is resolved. (Good luck with that. In March, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan threw out the former president’s countersuit against Carroll, blasting Trump for trying to delay the case.)
Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation under a recent New York state law, the Adult Survivors Act, which gives grown victims a one-year window to file claims, regardless of when the abuse occurred. Hundreds of lawsuits are expected to be filed by the time the window closes this November, including some by alleged victims of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Last week, Judge Kaplan ruled that Carroll’s lawsuit may proceed, and denied Trump’s request to keep portions of his October deposition in the case sealed. Trump’s claim that the transcript was supposed to be confidential, wrote the judge, was “entirely baseless.”
Barring a settlement, a trial is scheduled to begin in April.
This is the second lawsuit Carroll has brought against Trump. In 2019, she sued him for defamation. That case is still pending. But this action marks the first time she has tried to hold him accountable for the alleged dressing room attack.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone is shocked by these claims. Carroll is, after all, only one of 26 women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. In 2005, in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women.
After decades of silence, Carroll said, she came forward because she was emboldened by the #MeToo movement. And it’s not just Trump whom she accuses. In fact, in her memoir, she has compiled a list of men who have been threatening or abusive toward her. Each holds a place of dishonor on what she calls “The Most Hideous Men of My Life List,” starting with a boy who abused her as a child and ending with Trump at No. 20.
(Actually, that’s not quite true; she saves the very last spot on the list for the convicted rapist and killer Reginald McFadden, with whom she had a chance encounter outside her cottage in upstate New York in 1994. Her dog scared him off; he was later charged with raping and trying to kill her neighbor that evening.)
I’ve been accused — by MAGA Republicans, mainly — of having an unhealthy obsession with our 45th president. Believe me, I am as sick of him as most other Americans are.
But we can never forgive nor forget the damage that this twice-impeached commander in chief has inflicted, before and after he became president. We cannot allow his status as former president to prevent justice from being done, whether he is accused of trying to subvert the election, or of instigating a Capitol riot, or of ripping off a woman’s tights and penetrating her in a department store dressing room.
He is, after all, threatening to make a third White House run. As we know from years of experience now, truth and reality are to be discarded as mere inconveniences when they get in his way.
For example, in his just-unsealed deposition, Trump tries to twist an interview that Carroll gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2019 to his advantage. Carroll told Cooper that she did not think of Trump’s alleged assault as “rape.”
“It was not sexual,” she said. “It just hurt.”
Rape, she told Cooper, “carries so many sexual connotations” and “most people think of rape as being sexy” and “think of the fantasies.” As someone who has never been a fan of the “bodice ripper” romantic genre, I would vehemently disagree on that point, but that may be a generational difference between us.
Still, incredibly, Trump claimed to be vindicated by Carroll’s remarks.
“She actually indicated that she loved [it]. Okay?” he told her attorney. “... In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, replied, “So, sir, I just want to confirm: It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
“Well,” replied Trump, “she said something to that effect.”
So: I never met her, I never raped her, but if I did ... she enjoyed it?
What else would you expect from such a hideous human being?