It’s been nearly seven years since the nation heard Donald Trump bragging on tape to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about his habit for sexually assaulting women. It’s been seven years since the Republican presidential candidate shrugged off the remark as “locker room talk” – classifying sexual abuse as private, unserious, a prerogative of what he still claimed, then at 70 years old, was his boyish playfulness. It’s been seven years since he won the presidency anyway – a historic humiliation of women that affirmed powerful men’s impunity for sexual abuse, and portrayed Trump’s boorish hostility to women’s dignity as compatible with the solemnity of presidential power. It’s been just over six years since those women poured into the streets in defiant declaration of their own citizenship at the Women’s March, and six years since a wave of anger at the rampant and habitual sexual abuse of women by men exploded into the #MeToo movement.
But it took a New York jury less than three hours to unanimously agree that Donald Trump sexually abused the writer E Jean Carroll in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in the mid-90s, and then defamed her when he said she was lying about it. When the verdict came down, it felt like letting out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
Donald Trump is, we can now say, legally affirmed as a sexual abuser. A total of 26 women have publicly accused him of misconduct. Two of those other accusers testified at the Carroll trial, describing how Trump allegedly cornered them, like he did Carroll, in tight, semi-public places, after brief conversations, and besieged them by kissing, groping, and yes, grabbing their genitals. These women matter in their particularity – their humiliation and anger at what he did to them, their certainty, often carried for years, that there was nothing they could do about it.
But Donald Trump has also long served, in the imagination of American women, as a symbol. He’s the embodiment of male privilege; things are made unreasonably easy for him that for women are made unjustly hard. Trump is a man who enjoys being treated as smart even when he is ignorant, who is trusted by many even when he’s outright lying, whose inflated opinion of himself is rewarded with jobs he isn’t qualified for and power he cannot be trusted with. He is also a symbol of casual misogyny, of droning and repetitive male sexual entitlement, and of the dismissiveness – ranging from vulgar indifference to seething contempt – that many men feel for the proposition that they should treat women as their equals. This much has been apparent for as long as Trump has monopolized national attention, and it was made vividly clear over the course of the trial by Carroll’s legal team, whose thoroughgoing account of a series of allegations against Trump by multiple women illustrated the former president’s modus operandi for sexual assault – a grim routine he seems to have repeated over and over again, against any number of women, for decades.
Part of what has been so provoking for feminists about Donald Trump is not that he is so unique in his habit of sexual predation, but that he is so typical. Women like Carroll, along with the two other accusers who testified in support of her claim, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, describe eerily familiar encounters with the former president, each marked by Trump’s signature combination of ostentatious wealth and singular bad taste. Leeds, a woman roughly Carroll’s age, describes being seated next to Trump on an airplane in the 1970s after she was upgraded to first class; after chit-chatting, he lunged at her, assaulting her as other passengers and crew looked on. They did not help; she had to extricate herself. Stoynoff, a former writer for People, recalled Trump cornering her in a room at Mar-a-Lago in the aughts, while she was there to write a profile of him and Melania. “We’re going to go to Peter Luger’s, we’re going to have an affair,” she recalled Trump telling her, referring to the famous New York City steak restaurant. These stories, and those of other women, show that Trump considered sexual access to women a prerogative of his maleness and his money, something that he was entitled to regardless of their own opinions on the matter, and something for which he would never be held accountable. What was enraging is not just that he believed this. It is that for a very long time, he was right.
But if Trump is a typical abuser, E Jean Carroll’s case is deeply atypical. For one thing, few people would have the grace and stamina that Carroll showed on the stand, particularly under the pressure of a grueling cross-examination which the 79-year-old Carroll handled with lucidity, calm and occasionally righteous pointedness. Once, in response to a line of questioning conducted in sexist bad faith by Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, Carroll bluntly declared: “He raped me whether I screamed or not.” The line seemed destined to instantly enter the historical lexicon for its clear-sighted defiance.
And it’s true, too, that few survivors would ever have had the support or resources to pursue a civil claim against their attacker that Carroll has had. Carroll was aided by the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a one-time extension of the statute of limitations for sexual violence civil cases in New York, a bill that was pushed by the New York State Democratic party in no small part with an eye toward allowing Carroll to sue Trump. She was aided, too, by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor, who is funding Carroll’s litigation. In short, there was an impressive, monied and not wholly benevolent machine behind Carroll’s lawsuit, one that was interested in the outcome of her claim more because of who her attacker is than because of any principled opposition to sexual violence. It would be reductive, and false, to paint Carroll as a mere pawn of this machine; she has proved herself to be much more formidable. But it is unfortunate that so few women receive such support.
It’s often said that justice for sexual assault accusers is a matter of believing women. But what seemed most at stake in E Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump was not whether she would be believed, but whether it would matter. Trump’s own statements about his conduct toward women, the accounts of more than two dozen women about how he treated them, and everything suggested by all his actions, attitude and character all indicate that Carroll is telling the truth; that much seemed obvious long before the trial started. What was of greater significance was whether the court – one of those recalcitrant and frequently reactionary bodies that are entrusted with making official designations of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable – would agree with her claim that it mattered, that he didn’t get to act that way, that she deserved better. It is enormously significant, not just for E Jean Carroll but for all the women who were subjected to living under the indignity of a Trump presidency, that it did.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.