When writer E. Jean Carroll was asked under oath this week why she was in court, she didn’t mince words.
“I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” the former advice columnist said. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.”
It’s that last sentence that has been rattling around in my brain since I read the transcript of Carroll’s first day of testimony.
It’s that last part that has been rattling around in my brain since I read the transcript of Carroll’s first day of testimony. “I am here to get my life back.” It’s striking because it’s a sentence about Carroll, not the former president she testified she encountered at Bergdorf Goodman nearly 30 years ago. The former president she says raped her in the dressing room of Bergdorf’s. The former president who she claims held her against the wall with “his whole weight” and put her in a situation where she was “too frightened to think if I was afraid or not.” The former president whose actions Carroll says left an indelible negative impact on her career and left her “unable to ever have a romantic life again.” (Trump has denied these allegations, calling them “fiction.”)
That former president’s lengthy history of alleged sexual misconduct and assault has been well documented. It was written about before, during and after his disastrous and destructive presidency, and will certainly be written about again as he gears up for the 2024 presidential election. More than 26 women have accused him of sexual misconduct, and in 2016 he vowed he would sue them all. In 2020, journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy published a book containing 43 new allegations. (Trump, as recently as October 2022, claimed he has never kissed any woman without her consent.)
But I don’t want to waste too much space on that former president. I want to talk about Carroll and the community of survivors who made it possible for her to sue her alleged attacker for battery and defamation in civil court; to seek a path forward that felt like justice to her.
I often feel like turning my brain off, letting the news wash over me without letting any of it really sink in. I even felt that way about this trial, still drained from years of writing about the former president’s lengthy history of mistreatment of women. But as justice advocate and survivor Alison Turkos reminded me, disconnection is only an option for those who haven’t experienced a given horror firsthand. For survivors of sexual assault, there are no breaks, just the hope of justice and healing.
And here, that means reading the transcript of Carroll’s testimony — acknowledging and honoring her story — by truly listening to and internalizing her words. This woman is bearing public witness against a man who could once again become the president of the United States. And that act of defiance must resonate far beyond the corners of a Manhattan courtroom.
This woman is bearing public witness against a man who could once again become the president of the United States.
Carroll first went public with her story in 2019, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. She wrote about the alleged rape in her memoir, an excerpt of which ran in New York Magazine. “I just thought, it’s time,” Carroll told The New York Times in 2019, when asked why she chose to tell this story publicly after so many years had passed. “I can’t keep up this facade.”
Going through the court system, criminal or civil, can be a daunting, exhausting, retraumatizing prospect for survivors. Many will never choose to file a lawsuit against their alleged abusers for that reason. But as Turkos pointed out, having the choice is what matters.
“Very similar to abortion access, I always want someone to be able to have access [to the court system],” said Turkos. “E. Jean really, really wanted to file this lawsuit ... And it is not anyone else’s decision. Talk about bodily autonomy. It’s not anyone else’s decision to decide what justice and healing looks like for her.”
Carroll is able to get her day in court in large part because of the Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which was signed into law in New York by Gov. Kathy Hochul in May of 2022. The ASA created a one-year lookback window which allows adult survivors of sexual assault to sue their abusers in civil court, regardless of when the alleged assault occurred and even if the statute of limitations has passed. When a similar state law, the Child Victims Act, went into effect in 2019, it resulted in more than 10,000 cases being filed.
The ASA would not exist without the tireless work of a group sexual assault survivors. And one of the people who fought tooth and nail to get the ASA passed is Turkos. She sees Carroll’s day in court as “the epitome of collective liberation.”
“E. Jean is able to be inside of that courtroom because survivors like myself, Drew Dixon, Evelyn Yang [and others] worked exhaustively to lobby and share our stories to ensure that the law was passed,” said Turkos. “It’s not just people who are famous or their perpetrators were famous, but survivors passed a law to open the civil court system. And that’s monumental.”
That hard-fought battle, however, is only one more step in the journey toward accountability. And so it is imperative that we do not turn “turn away” but instead face this trial — and the community that made it possible — head on. Because it is not the former president who really matters in this story. It’s Carroll. It’s the survivors who will never choose to sue their abusers, and the nonfamous ones who will, like the nearly 1,000 imprisoned women who are suing prison staff for alleged sex abuse. It’s the visible and invisible group of survivors and advocates who got her into that courtroom.
“E. Jean [Carroll] is sitting in that room and we are wrapping our arms around her,” said Turkos, “and she got there because a community carried her there.”
