In the six years since she first wrote that real estate scion Donald Trump slammed her against a wall in the mid-’90s and fingered her in a department store dressing room, E. Jean Carroll has been reduced, as every woman stepping up to charge rape is, to a caricature of sexual essence. Is she pretty? Hot? Rape-able?
“Not my type,” said the president when asked about her story in 2019, even though, in a deposition, shown a photograph of her, he risibly confused her with another ethereal blonde, his own second wife. But reductio ad T&A has always been Trump’s favorite deflection strategy with women, as well as being his old commercial stock in trade: One of the promises he made—and kept—before entering politics was mandating “higher heels and smaller bikinis” for women in his beauty pageants.
Besides Trump’s megaphone for personal insults, Carrol had to confront the “victim” label that is so distorting to a woman’s self-image and that afflicts any woman who accuses a sexual predator, whether president or janitor.
