E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who described in lurid detail what anyone would call a rape, told the New York Times that what she alleged President Trump did to her wasn’t really rape. “I have not been raped,” she said.
Instead, she characterizes what occurred as a “fight” and says she decides what to call what happened. Carroll also says she chooses not describe it as rape because of what is happening to “migrant” women at the border.
In her new book and a magazine article, Carroll accused the president of assaulting her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, a department store in New York. But the story simply doesn’t sound true. And the way Carroll introduces the dressing-room attack sounds like a bodice-ripper in a modern setting.
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The Story
Carroll ran into Trump that day a quarter-century ago, she wrote in New York magazine, when she was leaving the store. He persuaded her to return and help him pick out a gift for a woman.
Trump, she wrote, importuned her to try on a “lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray,” then trapped her in the dressing room and raped her.
Carroll described the assault this way:
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 [himself] 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.
Yet, she says, that does not describe rape. Rather, it was a “fight.”
“Every woman gets to choose her word,” she told the Times. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it…. My word is fight, my word is not the victim one. I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought.”
That’s what she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I was not thrown on the ground and ravaged,” she told him. “The word rape carries so many sexual connotations. This was not sexual. It just hurt.”
Rape Fantasies?
Carroll’s account does indeed depict someone who was “ravaged,” but that aside, she added this: “I think most people think of rape as being sexy. They think of the fantasies.”
Cooper cut away to an advertisement after that bizarre remark, but the comment is telling on two counts. First, as conservative writer J. Bradford Williams observed, Carroll’s story is remarkably similar to a storyline on Law & Order SVU.
Second, her account of the interaction with Trump before he supposedly attacked her does not sound like the prelude to a rape. It sounds like serious flirting in which she was a willing participant that might have led to something else.
Here’s her rendition of the encounter:
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!
What happened next really wasn’t rape, she told the Times, because she “fought.”
Another reason why it wasn’t rape? Calling it rape would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection,” she told MSNBC talker Lawrence O’Donnell.
Illegal-alien women “are being raped around the clock”?
A close reading of Carroll’s story suggests she has the fantasies she imputes to others.
Image of E. Jean Carroll: Screenshot of interview with Elle magazine
