Petri: What Trump’s ‘she’s not my type’ defense really says

By Alexandra Petri

The Washington Post

No, officer. It was not I. I only poison brunettes.

I would never strangle and disembowel a Pembroke corgi.

I would not draw or quarter anyone with a widow’s peak!

How dare you accuse me of this, when I only kill men with strong chins?

You are insulting me when you suggest — you dare suggest! — I would choke and bludgeon repeatedly, with a club decoupaged in Jackson twenties, someone whose jawline was not perfectly square. I almost think you do not know me, to have thought me capable of such a thing.

I would never in my wildest imaginings dream of locking in a secluded cabin full of spiders anyone not fluent in French, and I am hurt you would think of it.

I would never drown a neighbor who was above 5 feet.

I would not dream of letting my bears tear apart someone who had not seen “Logan’s Run.”

Please, please! What do you take me for?

Never, under any circumstances, would I craft a cape from human skin belonging to someone whom my friends did not agree was at least an EIGHT.

“She’s not my type,” the president says, in response to an excerpt from writer E. Jean Carroll’s recent book, accusing him of sexual assault. “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.”

I am sick to death of this, this brazenness, this insult heaped upon injury. This conflation of two things that are not the same. That the words he says to dismiss this are “not my type”; as though a violation would have been a compliment. As though to be told the horrible things a man would do in the name of attraction is flattery, not threat.

There is a door in my head behind which I am screaming all the time. That this man is president, that a man we think capable of this is president, that this will dent nothing, because this is what is expected. That these are the words that issue from him instead of a proper denial. That he thinks to say he would not rape a woman is an insult.

Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter @petridishes.