Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll just became one of the many women to accuse President Trump of sexual misconduct. But she won’t call it rape.
The list now stretches to at least 20 alleged victims, who have accused Trump of behavior ranging from unwanted kissing to full-on sexual assault. In her story for New York Magazine last week, Carroll accused Trump of rape, though she’s squishy about using the word. The only time it comes up in the story in relation to Trump, the word is on her friend’s lips.
“He raped you,” Carroll says her journalist friend repeated on the phone. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”
Carroll didn’t go to the police, writing that she was afraid of retribution from Trump’s lawyers. She finally decided to say something last week, though. And she still won’t call the alleged incident “rape.”
Trump has denied Carroll’s accusation, stating, bizarrely, “She’s not my type.” I wrote on Friday that in evaluating Carroll’s claims, we should consider the evidence of the story as it unfolds. And whether or not Carroll’s story is true, sexual assault is still too common in our society.
Unfortunately, in a politicized climate, these types of allegations are difficult to address. As my colleague Kaylee McGhee wrote, somewhere over the course of the #MeToo movement, “sexual assault became just another political commodity.”
As Carroll has gone on the media circuit to discuss her story, she has already made matters considerably worse in this regard. When asked on MSNBC if she would press charges against Trump, Carroll said she wouldn’t. But her reason why makes absolutely no sense.
“I would find it disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection,” Carroll said. “As you know, the women have very little protection there. It would just be disrespectful.”
If the allegations are true, it’s actually more disrespectful to rape victims if she refuses to press charges with the excuse that other rapes are worse. And by politicizing the issue, she undermines the defense that her accusation was simply the truth, not a political ploy.
If Carroll was raped, it doesn’t matter that other rapes are occurring. Does it not matter to her if a rapist is president? Wouldn’t her rationale discourage some rape victims from coming forward, encouraging them to tell themselves an attack they endured just wasn’t a big deal?
“Mine was three minutes. I’m a mature woman. I can handle it. I can keep going. You know my life has gone on. I’m a happy woman,” Carroll continued. “But for the women down there and, actually, around the world, you know, in every culture this is going on no matter high in society or low in society, it just seems disrespectful that I would bring … It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
To any rape victim, Carroll’s comments must seem astounding. If the attack Carroll described is true, three minutes is certainly enough time to create trauma. She does a disservice to rape victims by pretending it was no big deal.
Then, adding to her unreasonable rhetoric during an interview with Anderson Cooper, she said the alleged encounter was a “fight,” not a “rape.”
“This was not sexual,” she said. “It just, it hurt.”
Yet, here’s how Carroll describes the alleged event, in her own article:
That’s called a rape. And if you say otherwise, you diminish the experience of rape victims. Rape is sexual, of course, but it’s not “sexy,” which is something Carroll doesn’t appear to be able to differentiate.
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy,” she said on CNN. “They think of the fantasies.”
Not only is Carroll arguing that her alleged rape wasn’t a big deal because it happens to other people, she’s also saying that it wasn’t really a rape because it didn’t last long and it wasn’t even sexual. What?
Even this doesn’t mean Carroll’s accusations must be false, but she certainly isn’t helping her claim. Any rape, under any circumstances, is traumatic. Carroll does her story, and rape victims, no good by pretending otherwise. In fact, she is implying that other women’s potentially similar stories aren’t that significant.
