Tuesday, May 2, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Donald Trump’s argument that he couldn’t have raped E. Jean Carroll because “she’s not my type” is meaningless.
Not because he thought a photo of himself with Carroll was a picture of him with his ex-wife Marla Maples, though that did happen.
Not because he’s a prolific liar, either, though his lifetime of practice has been thoroughly documented. (The Washington Post’s Fact Checker found that by the end of his four years in office, “Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”)
It’s meaningless because even if it were true that he doesn’t go for thin blonde former beauty queens, rape isn’t about attraction.
It’s not about desire, but domination. It’s not, “I like you,” but “I want to hurt you.”
And Trump’s suggestion that, as Carroll’s lawyer put it, she was “too ugly to assault” is beyond ugly. Doesn’t that imply that he wouldn’t mind raping someone more worthy of his mistreatment?
It’s telling that Trump seems to think being rapable is an honor he simply would not have bestowed on a woman who would have been 52 in the spring of 1996, when Carroll says Trump pulled her into a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, slammed her against a wall, yanked down her tights and shoved his fingers and then his penis inside her.
Carroll took the stand again Monday in her civil suit against Trump. She’s doing that, she says, because he raped her then and is defaming her now.
“Does anybody believe,” the former and perhaps future president posted, “that 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, (with me being very well known, to put it mildly!), into a tiny dressing room, and …. Her?” What is his cutoff age for rape, I wonder?
Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women. If these accounts are politically motivated, why were these women telling their friends about what he’d done to them years before he became a candidate, or for that matter, a Republican?
He’s used the “not sexy enough to accost” defense before. After a New Yorker named Jessica Leeds said he groped and stuck his hand up her skirt on an airplane in the ’80s, his answer was, “Yeah, I’m going to go after you. Believe me — she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.” That?
First choice or not, we all heard from his own mouth that “when you’re a star” you grab first, ask never and keep on walking, hahaha.
In keeping with tradition, both Trump and his battering ram of an attorney, Joe Tacopina, also questioned why Carroll didn’t scream or call the police.
“He raped me whether I screamed or not,” she answered Tacopina, whose badgering was so blatant that the judge repeatedly called him out.
Carroll didn’t cry out then, she said, because she didn’t want to make a scene.
But she did get louder on the witness stand when she answered Tacopina. Women often keep silent about an attack, she told him, because they fear being asked what they could have done to stop it. “They’re always asked, ‘Why didn’t you scream?’ ”
Rape victims are far more likely to freeze than to fight or call for help, and I hope that juries are starting to understand that.
Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychiatrist in Pennsylvania, testified last November at Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles rape trial that “even aggressive verbal shouting — screaming — is not as common as we would think. It’s more common than physical resistance, but a minority of people have physical resistance, even in the case of stranger rape.”
Of course, it will be up to the jury to decide whether it’s more likely than not that Carroll’s account is what happened.
But if she were lying, wouldn’t she claim to know exactly when this was? If she were inventing tales about how she was harmed, would she really risk going so far as to say that this violation so killed her desire that she never had sex again? If that weren’t true, how could she be sure that anyone who could prove otherwise wouldn’t?
Carroll says she finally was able to knee Trump and get away. And all these years later, she is raising her voice, and hoping that we can hear her.
Melinda Henneberger is a columnist for The Kansas City (Mo.) Star.
