On May 9, a jury found former president Donald Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation of Emmy-winning writer and columnist, E. Jean Carroll. Carroll had accused Trump of a violent rape and assault in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996. She detailed the attack in a June 21, 2019 cover story for New York magazine.
Next to a stark portrait of Carroll, the words,”This is what I was wearing 23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room,” run down the side of the cover.
Carroll wrote that she ran into Trump at the New York City department store where he was shopping for a girlfriend. She details a convivial shopping excursion where they joked about lingerie. But then Trump pushed Carroll into a dressing room, pinned her against a wall and pulled down her tights. “Forcing his fingers around my private area, [he] thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me,” she wrote.
It was a violent rape; her head slammed against the wall and the forcible and unwanted assault “hurt,” as she told the court during the several days Carroll testified on the stand.
In addition to Carroll, other women who had accused Trump of sexual assault testified, including a journalist, providing a clear pattern of abuse by Trump. Like Carroll, all the women had told someone contemporaneously about the assaults. The “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump admits to sexually assaulting women, was also played at the trial.
Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, attacked Carroll as a liar repeatedly and was admonished by the judge. His 1950s style victim-blaming cross examination was met by Carroll’s mettle: “I’m telling you: He raped me whether I screamed or not.”
Trump did not testify nor did he attend the trial, instead leaving the country to go golfing in Scotland at one of his clubs. But in a taped deposition played in court, Trump was shown a photo of Carroll, who he claimed not to know and who he said was “not his type.” He identified the woman in the photo — Carroll — as his second wife, Marla Maples.
In the end, after 90 minutes of instructions to the jury on the various charges, the largely working-class jury of six men and three women took fewer than three hours to find unanimously for Carroll, awarding her $5 million in punitive and compensatory damages.
Carroll issued a statement after the verdict, saying, “I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back. Today, the world finally knows the truth. This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”
Well-known lesbian attorney Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, who famously represented Edie Windsor in her 2013 Supreme Court case that vitiated part of the Defense of Marriage Act, represented Carroll. Kaplan told NBC’s Today show Wednesday morning, “I’ve rarely felt more confident about an appeal than I do about this one. They have no legitimate arguments for appeal.”
Enraged by the verdict, Trump ranted in a dozen Truth Social posts. He accused the judge of bias, called the case a “witch hunt trial” and denied knowing who Carroll is.
In all caps, Trump posted Wednesday morning: “I HAVE NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN, WHO MADE A FALSE AND TOTALLY FABRICATED ACCUSATION, IS. HOPEFULLY JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED ON APPEAL!”
But Carroll said justice was finally served. On “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday she said she shook Tacopina’s hand after the trial and told him, “He did it and you know it.”
She also said with the verdict that the profile of the “perfect” rape victim who does everything right had been shattered and that maybe now more women will be believed.
Witnessing Carroll’s bravery and Kaplan’s impressive defense (Trump had told her in the deposition that she wasn’t his “type,” either), many victims/survivors took to Twitter to thank Carroll for standing up against Trump and his powerful cohort. In her they saw a woman who — despite her jocular manner — had her life forever altered by Trump raping her.
As I wrote on Twitter in a post that received over 212,000 views,
“The bravery of E. Jean Carroll cannot be overstated.”
So many women replied to that tweet with their own stories and how they felt Carroll was fighting for them vicariously. Back in 2019, when Carroll published her story in New York magazine, I wrote for PGN that if someone of Carroll’s stature and celebrity could not get justice, there was little hope for those of us who are not famous, particularly not LGBTQ people who rarely get justice for sexual assault, even though they — lesbians, bisexual women and trans women — are at disproportionate risk for rape.
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis echoed those points herself in a statement praising Carroll and Kaplan that was also a harsh indictment of the former president: “E. Jean Carroll’s courage, and her legal team’s expertise led by LGBTQ icon Robbie Kaplan, must become a turning point in history for all survivors of sexual abuse and torment. Voters have already held Donald Trump accountable for his atrocious, discriminatory presidency and treatment of women and all marginalized communities.”
Ellis said, “Jurors and the world at large got to see his disgusting rhetoric on full display, unapologetically bragging about rape and abuse. Media reporting on his ongoing, inexplicable political career must follow Kaplan’s lead and challenge the former president’s lies and abusive behavior. Voters and the media can follow the jury’s lead to continue holding Trump accountable for his revolting words and actions.”
Though Trump’s attorney and his cohort are trying to spin the jury’s decision to find for sexual assault rather than rape, Kaplan says, sexual abuse is a “very, very serious offense.”
It is to be hoped that Kaplan, who augured such a tectonic change for LGBTQ people with her case for Edie Windsor, will have done that for rape and sexual assault victims, too.
As I wrote for PGN in 2021, America is failing rape victims. There are few convictions and justice is rare. Yet one in five women is a rape victim. The trajectory of E. Jean Carroll’s case is not anomalous — it’s standard. #MeToo was supposed to change that. It hasn’t.
But what did happen on Tuesday when that jury came back with a unanimous verdict is that Carroll got validation and so too did the women who testified in her case.
In her own statement on the case, Kaplan was succinct: “No one is above the law, not even a former President of the United States,” she said, adding, “For far too long, survivors of sexual assault faced a wall of doubt and intimidation. We hope and believe today’s verdict will be an important step in tearing that wall down.”