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BREAKING: Sometimes Donald Trump tells the truth.
Not often, of course, and not when cornered. But when he tells you he wants to make America “great” again, he means it. It’s just that his definition of “great” involves rewinding the clock six decades to a time when women and minorities knew their place. If women were sexually harassed at work, they quietly accepted it as the price of admission. And if you, say, happened to take out an ad in the paper demanding the execution of five innocent Black men, no apology or remediation was required.
Because when you’re a star, they let you do it. Fortunately, or unfortunately.
There’s no better heuristic for this than the recently concluded E. Jean Carroll defamation and sexual battery lawsuit, which is still on the former president’s mind today as he trawls through his accuser’s Twitter feed for salacious posts that suggest … well, something. He’s quite content for his users to draw their own conclusions from screenshots of Carroll saying in 2014, “There’s no such thing as a slut. Only sexual geniuses.” Or in 2013, “A chap is not a mind reader. Show him what you like. Or he will soon regret he HAS a penis.”
In case that implication was unclear, he spelled it out at his CNN-hosted MAGA rally last week.
“What kind of a woman meet somebody and brings them up and within minutes, you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, okay?” he sneered, as Kaitlan Collins haplessly tried to regain control of the interview.
Slut. He was calling Carroll a slut. And everyone in 1962 knows sluts can’t be raped.
That’s why Trump dispatched his brutish lawyer Joseph Tacopina to engage in a 1960s-style cross examination of Carroll in which he sarcastically demanded to know why she wouldn’t report the assault, why she didn’t behave like a “real” victim, and most of all, why she didn’t scream:
TACOPINA: In fact, in response to this supposedly serious situation that you viewed as a fight, where you got physically hurt, it’s your story that you not only didn’t scream out, but you started laughing?
CARROLL: I did not scream. I started laughing. That is right. I don’t think I started laughing. I think I was laughing going into the dressing room, and I think I laughed pretty consistently after the kiss to absolutely throw cold water on anything he thought was about to happen. Laughing is a very good — I use the word weapon — to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention.
It’s the same reason Trump has been screeching into the ether for a week about the gross unfairness of the court refusing to let him tell jurors that Carroll’s cat’s name was “vagina,” something which he brings up at every appearance, including on CNN.
Perhaps you are wondering how the name of Carroll’s cat could possibly be relevant to a sexual battery claim. But that’s the wrong question in 1960. Just ask Trump, he’ll tell you, the right question is: “How can a woman of such low character be sexually assaulted?” And the answer is, she can’t! She’s either lying, or she was asking for it.
And at the time he carried out the assault for which a jury just found him liable, he was right. A woman of imperfect “virtue” who did not resist to the utmost could not claim to have been sexually assaulted. Even in the 1990s when he attacked Carroll, her friends were divided, with one telling her to go immediately to the police, and the other advising her to keep quiet because “he had a lot of attorneys and he would just bury her.” She took the advice of the second, and kept her mouth shut about the assault for more than two decades.
But it’s not 1960. It’s 2023, and we are done with that shit. Or at least we’re trying, imperfectly, to get to the other side of it.
Trump complained bitterly about the “Access Hollywood” tape being admitted in evidence, showing him bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, something he and his supporters have tried to retcon into a comment on women’s willingness to be groped by “stars.”
“I said if you’re famous and rich or whatever I said, but I said if you’re a star, you are – and I said women let you,” he blustered on CNN. “I didn’t say you grab. I said women let. You know you didn’t use that word, but if you look, women let you.”
He did, in fact, say “grab.” This wasn’t one of the times he was telling the truth. Although the preposterous lie does speak to an understanding of consent that confuses “let you grope them” with “don’t call the cops afterward.”
In the event, the tape was admitted at trial, along with the testimony of two other women who accused Trump of assault in similar circumstances thanks to Rules 412 and 415 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. Those laws, enacted in the 70s and the 90s respectively, exclude a victim’s sexual history while providing a specific mechanism to introduce similar bad acts (i.e. propensity evidence) by an alleged assailant. Similarly, New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which came into effect in November of 2022, extends the statute of limitations for victims to file civil suits against their abusers. This law, which Trump has challenged as unconstitutional, explicitly acknowledges the reality that social stigma and contemporaneous laws which allowed abusers to interrogate victims’ sexual history were a powerful disincentive to coming forward with rape allegations.
Trump demands to make sexual assault 1960 again, insisting that it couldn’t have happened because she never screamed or reported it, while simultaneously arguing that a woman who willingly went into a dressing room for “hanky panky” got what she deserved.
But it’s not 1960, so even a jury that included an avid Tim Pool fan took less than three hours to find him liable and reach a $5 million verdict. It’s a victory of sorts, if too small and far too late. And a small step toward greatness, even as Trump and his irredentist goons are trying to burn the country and the last 60 years of progress to the ground.
Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.
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