The case of E. Jean Carroll’s allegation against President Trump continues to grow more curious. On the one hand, the New York City advice columnist has undermined her quarter-century-old rape allegation against the then-real estate mogul through a series of baffling and disquieting cable news appearances. She’s described rape as “sexy,” leading Anderson Cooper to cut to commercials. She’s declined to entertain suing Trump because it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock.” And when asked what she wishes she had told Trump — again, a man she is accusing of violent and forcible rape — she said she would have asked for his tax returns. Really.
In fact, Carroll has worked pretty hard to undermine her own credibility. Her first-person account accusing not just Trump but multiple other men of sexual assault, part of a magazine book promotion, was surely an inferior vehicle for such an accusation compared to, say, an objective news report.
Yet we cannot write off Carroll’s claims thanks to two friends of hers contemporaneously corroborating her account.
Although New York Magazine did its due diligence in confirming the existence of the corroborators, it did a disservice by failing to provide any substance of their corroboration. Megan Twohey, the New York Times reporter who broke the Harvey Weinstein story with Jodi Kantor, got the two to go on the record in an interview published on the New York Times’ podcast, “The Daily.”
“I remember her saying repeatedly: ‘He pulled down my tights. He pulled down my tights,'” writer Lisa Birnbach recalls Carroll saying after the alleged incident. Birnbach told Carroll, who told her about the event a day or so thereafter, to go to the police. The second witness, Carol Martin, was told after Birnbach.
“I said: ‘Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t tell anybody this,'” Martin recalls saying.
Like the presentation of the New York Magazine story, the New York Times’ decision to introduce the witnesses on the record with selectively chosen interview excerpts, accompanied by Carroll no less, leaves much to be desired and undercuts the notion of independent corroboration.
Still, the underlying point remains and is now strengthened: Carroll separately told two people seemingly consistent details about this alleged attack immediately after it allegedly happened. If she’s lying, then she must have lied to two people about someone who, at the time, decades ago, was an apolitical and widely liked figure.
Critics point to Carroll’s repeated, bizarre statements as evidence she’s lying. But if Carroll was in fact assaulted, by anyone even if not by Trump, her behavior is consistent with a lifetime of suppressing trauma.
Campus crusaders have promulgated the lie that trauma impedes the ability to recall details of an assault. In fact, science suggests the opposite. The fight or flight response to an attack may enhance a victim’s recollection of specific details or timeline of events. Carroll’s account is consistent, even if her statements are outlandish and weird. Given the cognitive dissonance between her lifetime of promoting third-wave feminism and her suppression of alleged repeated assaults, her refusal to call what obviously would have been a rape a rape because she “fought” makes sense. She may refuse to call herself a victim because she so desperately doesn’t want to be one. Denying that reality would lend itself to strange and unsettling statements.
This allegation on its own may not yet meet the preponderance of evidence standard. That Carroll doesn’t want to hand over her coat to forensics experts certainly doesn’t help her case. But her allegation is not obviously untrue. Just as we cannot presume guilt of those accused, naysayers ought not presume accusers are making things up — certainly not with the corroboration Carroll has.
