By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post
Late Monday morning, an attorney for Donald Trump went fishing for a gotcha moment as he cross-examined E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s.
Was it true, Joseph Tacopina asked Carroll, that she’d once posted on Facebook that she was a “massive” fan of “The Apprentice”?
Sure, Carroll said. She’d posted that. “I had never seen such a witty competition on television.”
Tacopina baited another hook: What about a Facebook post from 2012? Was it true that Carroll had asked her followers whether, for $17,000, they would be willing to have sex with Donald Trump, provided that they could “close your eyes and he’s not allowed to speak”? Did she remember making that joke?
“Mr. Tacopina,” Carroll said, “I made several jokes about Donald Trump.”
It’s hard to assess tone in courtroom transcripts, but reading Carroll’s responses to Tacopina’s questions — Carroll has accused Trump of defaming her when he called her rape accusation a “Hoax and a lie” — the word that kept coming to mind was “cheeky.” On the witness stand, Carroll was brash, funny, self-effacing and shrewd. She did not apologize for the way she had behaved during or after the alleged assault. She didn’t even try much to make sense of it. Yes, it was true that she’d wondered whether revealing the assault in her 2019 memoir would help juice the book’s sales — “I would like to sell the book I’m writing, yes,” she responded, as if talking to a 4-year-old — but that didn’t mean the assault hadn’t happened.
Yes, it was true that she’d personally described aspects of the alleged attack as “inconceivable.” But it simply wasn’t her job to conceive of why the Bergdorf Goodman fitting room door had been left unlocked, or why no salespeople had spotted Carroll and Trump going inside. It was her job to tell what she remembers happening, as well as she could.
Tacopina insisted that the outlandishness meant that the assault was a fiction; Carroll argued that the outlandishness is precisely what had made the assault possible. Of course she went willingly into the dressing room with a famous real estate mogul, planning to make him try on women’s lingerie. Up until the moment he allegedly shoved her against the wall, it all seemed like a “quite hilarious” story. The kind one might recount at dinner parties.
“In response to this supposedly serious situation that you viewed as a fight, where you got physically hurt, it’s your story that you not only didn’t scream out, but you started laughing?” Tacopina asked her last week.
“I don’t think I started laughing. I think I was laughing going into the dressing room, and I think I laughed pretty consistently after the kiss to absolutely throw cold water on anything he thought was about to happen,” Carroll replied.
Tacopina pressed on: Why didn’t she scream?
“I’m not a screamer,” she replied. “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”
In the most dizzying moment of the trial, Tacopina appeared to think he could cast Carroll as a man-hater by quoting back a line she’d once written, proposing the banishment of the male sex.
“At one point I think you propose we should dispose of all men?” he asked.
“Into Montana,” she replied.
“Into Montana?”
“Yeah, and retrain them.”
At this point, the judge interrupted, putting Tacopina out of his misery by explaining that Carroll’s writing had been satirical; she was directly referencing Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the famously tongue-in-cheek essay suggesting that the solution to Ireland’s economic problems was to eat children.
There is no pleasure in watching a trial on the topic of sexual assault. But there is a measure of gratification in watching the way E. Jean Carroll has carried herself on the stand; and how she has undermined expectations of how a rape victim should or should not behave.
Tacopina’s overarching strategy seems to involve convincing a jury that there are things Carroll said and did that a real assault victim simply wouldn’t say or do. It relies on playing Carroll against a trope that defense attorneys in sexual assault cases have leaned on for decades: Real rape victims act appropriately victimized. They do not laugh, watch popular television shows starring their alleged rapists, or try to sell books. Real rape victims scream, call the police, and have lives defined by trauma. “She is really minimizing true rape victims, real rape victims,” Tacopina said in his opening arguments. “She is exploiting their pain and their suffering.”
What Carroll was actually exploiting was Tacopina’s faulty assumptions about the meaning of victimhood. What she was really doing was rejecting the premise of his line of questioning. Pain and suffering might manifest in tears and panic attacks — and, by the way, Carroll described having some of those, too — or they might manifest in hysterical laughter, the kind that erupts when your brain hasn’t quite caught up with what’s happening to your body. They might manifest in refusing to ever set foot in Bergdorf Goodman again, or they might manifest, as Carroll testified, in accompanying your niece while she shopped for wedding gowns there, enjoying a glass of champagne, and trying to live in the moment.
On the witness stand, Carroll allowed herself to step outside of the mold of how we historically have imagined victims of the kinds of assault Carroll is alleging. It is not her job to be the kind of victim that Tacopina might have assumed she should be. It is not her job to play the kind of victim the jury might be used to seeing. It was her job to be the person she is: someone who is defiant, ambitious, funny and optimistic, even if she was there to tell a story of pain and suffering. She brought her whole self to the trial, and dared anyone to hold it against her.
Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.” Follow her on Twitter @MonicaHesse.
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