Is the 25-year-old rape charge a new pension system for women of a certain age?
I'm thinking about E Jean Carroll's prosecutions of Donald Trump and the sixty mostly middle-aged women who came out of the woodwork to accuse Bill Cosby of sex crimes
As I write this, the latest iteration of writer E Jean Carroll’s attempt to pry money out of….er…lawsuit against Donald J. Trump over an incident alleged to have occurred nearly 30 years ago drags on. The legal tic-toc has grown incredibly convoluted, not least because Carroll first sued Trump in 2019—and then there have been a dizzying round of appeals, motions to dismiss, added charges, counter suits and so on. If you want to attempt to make some sense of why E Jean’s still at it in 2024, I’ve found a pretty good explainer in the New York Times.
But the facts pertinent to my New-Pension-System-for-Women-of-a-Certain-Age theory are these:
The legal morass was entered in 2019, when Carroll, then 75, was flogging a new book titled What Do We Need Men For? a Modest Proposal. I suppose because the book fit neatly with the au courant subject of hating men (the #MeToo movement was in full swing), New York magazine gave the former womens’ magazine advice columnist the cover, blurbing an excerpt titled “Hideous Men: Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago. But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life.”
Seeing this new, spectral-looking E Jean was a bit of a shock to those of us who knew her through her sex advice columns in Elle magazine in the nineties where, as one of her editors put it, she answered readers with "the cheers and whoops and hollers of a fearless woman having a good ol' time.”
There’s no doubt she was very, as they say these days, sex positive. Bios claim that she was Playboy magazine’s first female contributing editor. She’d authored books titled Mr Right, Right Now, or How a Smart Woman Can Land Her Dream man in Six Weeks and A Dog in Heat is a Hot Dog and Other Rules to Live By. She wrote a bio of, and apparently romped with, wild man Hunter Thompson.
But by 2019, here was a new E Jean excreting rage from every pore and capable of writing:
“The whole female sex seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance with their lying, cheating, robbing, perjuring, assaulting, murdering, voting debauchers onto the Supreme Court, threatening one another with intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads, and so on.”
It’s important to note that Carroll does not actually identify Trump by name in that book excerpt but editors, being editors, probably said something like, “This rape thing involved Donald Trump and we can’t put that on the cover?? Are you crazy? We have magazines to sell.”
A Bergdorf Goodman dressing room becomes part of the story because in her excerpt Carroll describes meeting an unamed “very handsome” fellow she calls “the rich boy” in the department store where they flirt as he considers what to buy as a present for “a girl.” They finally end up in the lingerie section:
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
…
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
Not surprisingly the cover story got a lot of attention and Trump responded by railing that they’d never met and she wasn’t “his type” anyway.
(This was actually untrue. There is a photo of them meeting, albeit in passing, but to charge defamation, words must be false and defamatory — thus DJT’s tweets, or court testimony or whatever they were, could narrowly meet that test.)
Carroll could not have won a rape case in a criminal court so she went to a civil court where she charged DJT with sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll won that round when the jury awarded her $5 million in damages, two million for sexual abuse, three for defamation.
Now, a lot of people (people who have a life) would have stopped at $5 million but we are dealing with two monumental egotists. (DJT could have just shut his mouth and not given E Jean more material for more litigation.) These are folks who crumple and die without media attention. Also in 2024, politics and what appears to be the Take Down the Bad Orange Man movement have entered the mix, as it was recently discovered that a rich democrat has jumped in to pick up the cost of prosecuting E Jean’s new defamation charges generated by DJT’s newest flung insults. According to the Daily Beast, “it’s unclear if that payment arrangement has any material impact on the case itself, [but] the fact [that the secret donor] remained secret until now will surely support Trump’s unrelenting, conspiratorial complaints that ultra rich liberals have been pulling the strings on the efforts to take him down.”
Um…Yuh think?
So there’s that, but I still believe that the first law suit was propelled by the later-life-pension-system-for-single-women-who’ve-lost-their-looks-and-now-find-themselves- a-little-skint syndrome.
And in fact, in court testimony, Carroll admitted that in 2018, or shortly before publishing a memoir basically casting what sounded like any man she’d ever dallied with as rapists, cuts in advertising and magazine budgets had reduced her yearly income to $60,000.
One lesson here is ya gotta prepare for old age—so you’re not bitter and poor and willing to recast ambivalent sexual encounters as actionable crimes or torts.
One time-honored way women prepared for the decline in sexual marketability was to marry a guy and stick with him so that when he died you inherited, at the very least, a life insurance payout but in many cases his pension as well. The bottom line: If you were married to a good man, and you performed your wifely duties, you might not end up a rich widow but you would go into middle age in not-terrible shape. (Desperate and scared is a baaad look and there’s no room in the budget or Botox.) If he doesn’t croak on you, you’re still in better shape than if you’d been single. (That’s a joke. I think marriage is a great institution even, or especially, when people marry “just” because they are in love.)
But E Jean grew up in the era of “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” She was twice married and twice divorced at the time she launched her suit and living, as she puts it in her Amazon Books bio (in advance of Hideous Men), “in a little cabin on an island (it's about the size of a mattress) in upstate New York.”
I’m speculating there are a lot of women finding themselves similarly situated: losing their looks, poor, and alone because they bought into the marriage-is-slavery catechisms of the sixties and seventies. For instance, I suspect that if one dug a bit we’d find that many of the sixty women in the Bill Cosby pile-on fit that desperate and bitter profile.
Anyway, sisters (as if they’re listening…hah!) Life is really hard…for everybody. Aging is really hard…for everybody. Aging is actually not a conspiracy of the patriarchy. And trying to work the I’ve-just-realized-I-was-raped-thirty-years-ago play ultimately just makes the world worse.
Great piece Stephanie! Some guys are pigs. Most aren't. So are some women. Most aren't. I don't believe E Jean Carroll. 25 years ago, Trump raped her in a dressing room...Sure he did. And she waits till now to tell us? OK, sure. In an age of mass insanity and mass indoctrination "he said, she said" has morphed into "he said, she said and if his name is Trump, then believe the woman, because she said so and we know Trump is the devil and has to be guilty..." Biden and Obama and E Jean Carroll and all the rest of the lying liars must be believed, because the cognitive dissonance the useful idiots would experience if they realized that they are lying every time they open their mouths would be unbearable for them. So they block it out. And here we are.