The Defiant Humanity of E. Jean Carroll
She never tried to be a perfect victim. Her jury believed her anyway.
For a moment, it read like a loss. The first question asked on the verdict form in the matter of E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump concerned the writer’s battery allegation against the former president. Had she proved that Trump had raped her? “NO,” came the answer. But the form continued: Had Carroll proved that Trump had sexually abused her? YES. Had she proved that she had been injured as a result of his conduct? YES. The affirmatives accumulated: yes to defamation, to wanton disregard, to false statements, to actual malice.
The outcome was historic, my colleague David A. Graham wrote yesterday. And it was, despite that initial “NO,” a resounding victory for Carroll—and, symbolically, for the many other women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse. (Trump has denied all of their allegations—and has vowed to appeal yesterday’s ruling.) Carroll v. Trump was remarkable not only because it managed to hold the former president accountable, but also because of the way it achieved that victory. Carroll and her team rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to victimhood. They refused to apologize for Carroll’s idiosyncrasy or to allow her story to be reduced to callous tropes. In the process, they made a claim that is both obvious and revolutionary: There is no right way to be assaulted.
The initial whiplash of the verdict made for an apt conclusion: Very little about the trial had been typical. It was a civil proceeding whose claims included both battery and defamation. The former claim was possible because of a recent addition to the New York State legal code: the Adult Survivors Act, which provides a year-long window for adult victims of sexual assault to file civil claims despite expired statutes of limitation.
The most significantly atypical aspect of the proceeding, though, was Carroll herself. Sexual-assault trials involve compound cruelties: Claimants are made to rehash their pain in public, turning their allegations into a performance. Idiosyncrasy, in that context—being forgetful, say, or tearful, or angry, or uncertain—can hurt their case. It can suggest inconsistency. It might give a jury a reason to doubt the events being alleged, and to dismiss the story being told as the work of an unreliable narrator.
The assumptions fail to account for the fact that people’s reactions to trauma are as variable and unpredictable as people themselves tend to be. And Carroll refused to cede to that ignorant script. On the stand, she was candid about what she could not recall when it came to some details of the attack. She was thoughtful about the shame she’d felt in its aftermath. She acknowledged that one of the reasons she’d accompanied Trump into the dressing room was her belief that the whole thing—she’d get him to try on lingerie, she thought—would make a great story. She talked about getting pushed against the wall, and laughing in response. She talked about rape as an ongoing violation: a momentary act of violence that settled into her romantic life, her professional life, her reputation. She treated her own uniqueness as a crucial element of her credibility.
Trump, given ample opportunity to appear at the trial, declined to do so. Instead, his presence was limited to remarks he’d made during a deposition. In those comments, and in the social-media messages he posted while the trial was taking place, Trump tried to do what he always does when people challenge him: treat those who oppose him as hoaxes incarnate—as ideas, essentially, malleable and monstrous. The reflex can be an effective political strategy, but it is a poor legal one. Carroll countered every effort to dehumanize her with eloquent, insistent humanity.
Throughout the trial, Trump’s primary lawyer, Joe Tacopina, turned disdain into performance art. He invoked misleading tropes—the perfect victim, the woman who should know better—and built his case around Carroll’s lack of conformity to them. Why didn’t she call the police after the attack? Why didn’t she come forward publicly? Why didn’t she scream? Questioning Carroll, Tacopina sneered at her. He disrespected her. He made her cry. He tried to use her individuality against her.
It didn’t work. Carroll, just as she claims to have done in that dressing room, fought back. At every step, she emphasized—politely, patiently, unwaveringly—the foolishness of Tacopina’s line of questioning. She didn’t call the police because she didn’t call the police. She didn’t scream because “I’m not a screamer,” she said. The behavior at issue, she and her team kept reminding the jury, was not hers. It was Trump’s. “He raped me,” Carroll said, “whether I screamed or not.”
Carroll has called herself a member of the “silent generation”—a woman who grew up being told that other people’s abusive behavior is her shame to endure. Her case, all these years in the making, rejected both the silence and the shame. She and the other people who spoke during the trial—her lawyers, her friends, her fellow Trump accusers—told a story that was messy and complicated and intimate and very, very human. And the members of the jury believed it. They believed Carroll, as its narrator. Their belief was unanimous. The woman who refused to act as a perfect victim did not win a perfect verdict. The NO on the rape charge remains. But the verdict, as a whole, is the opposite of silent: big, loud, definitive. Carroll, in her suit, did not specify dollar amounts for the various damages she claimed. It was the members of the jury who were given the task of putting a price on her pain. They chose $5 million. The amount brought a stark resolution to a case that had put so much of its faith in nuance: He assaulted her, the jury decided. And he should pay the price.
