It took a Manhattan jury less than three hours to decide that Donald Trump should pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. This was just the damages part of the trial. Last year Trump was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the spring of 1996. For many of us, watching Trump actually being held accountable for something felt like a shock to the system. We so often see him evade responsibility, kick the can or, worse, we see others take the blame while he remains relatively unscathed.
Women like my mother and Carroll have seen some of their biggest victories of our society reversed by Trump.
Given that so far after the verdict Trump seems to be refraining from making potentially defamatory statements about Carroll, (something he struggled with throughout the trial) the damages number was probably an appropriate amount.
I don’t remember when I met the glamorous advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, but I do know that it was through my mom, feminist writer Erica Jong. They were very similar types, women in media in New York City. My mother wrote books; Carroll wrote an advice column. Both women are now in their 80s. They were contemporaries of now-77-year-old Trump. They went to the same parties, knew the same people, appeared on the same talk shows, frequented the same gossip pages. Shopped in the same stores, like Bergdorf Goodman, the department store where a jury found the sexual abuse happened.
My mother and Carroll are older now and just don’t have the same kind of command over parties and news cycles. Women like my mother and Carroll have seen some of their biggest victories of our society reversed by Trump. Guarantees of rights they thought they’d always have, like Roe v. Wade, are gone. The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed. Many of their dreams of female equality today seem depressingly out of reach. They burned their bras, but we still very much wear ours.
America has a deeply misogynistic edge to it. As women get older, we’re often treated with more and more contempt, if not altogether ignored by society. Age discrimination is significantly worse for women than for men. The irony of Trump, a man who’s received numerous allegations of sexual assault and misconduct (he continues to deny them, even when found liable by law), finally being held accountable by a woman his own age, who he said was “not his type,” is all the more gratifying because of this.
I feel a bit of personal ownership around this case; Carroll met lawyer George Conway at my house, who introduced her to lawyer Robbie Kaplan, who represented her in her case against Trump. I remember a little of the conversation. Conway was going on about how impressive Kaplan was, who at the time was most famous for bringing down the Defense of Marriage Act, leading Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to write that DOMA Section 3 “violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government.” Both Kaplan and Carroll are the kind of strong, accomplished women that tend not to hang around a Mar-a-Lago fashion show. Both believe that women should have more rights and not less.
There’s more irony to the case: None of this could have even happened were it not for the Adult Survivors Act, the 2019 legislation that allowed victims of sexual assault to initiate civil suits past the normal statutory deadline. This legislation likely wouldn’t have ever been enacted had it not been for the Me Too movement, which gained momentum in the years following the 2016 election of Trump and the misogynistic culture he promoted. So all of this is a product of a kind of Mobius strip of events and legislation.
At the time of the verdict, Carroll released a statement: “I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back. This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”
The women of my mother’s generation were born during World War II. They spent years fighting to matter the way men did. They were subjected to the kind of sexist treatment that would horrify millennials. These women fought ferociously for decades to expand their rights only to watch those rights begin to evaporate after 2016.
Women like my mother, Kaplan and Carroll have paid dearly in their fight to earn more rights for their daughters like me, and for future generations. Because of Trump, they’re still fighting. And we need them. If anything, Thursday’s verdict proves there is a very important place for women like them in society, women with the wisdom, tenacity and deep understanding of people who keep turning back time, limiting our rights and trying to ignore them.
