As a former litigator-turned-journalist, I am always intrigued by the ways each profession marshals proof. Both worlds rely on investigation — and what I find particularly fascinating is when one field borrows a tool developed by another. Writer E. Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump exemplifies this feedback loop.
If you’re following the ongoing trial, you might already know that in the fall of 2017, Carroll had planned to embark on a road trip and a book project in which she would collect the untold stories of pioneering, independent women across America.
But The New York Times’ bombshell, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual misconduct changed everything. That reporting, as she has testified, prompted Carroll to reassess her own untold stories. And eventually, it led her to publicly accuse Trump of raping her. (Trump has vehemently denied the allegation.)
But the #MeToo movement reverberates through the case in other, more subtle ways. One of the Times’ Weinstein reports featured the stories of women allegedly assaulted by Weinstein in the 1970s, women who did not complain to their employer, much less to the police.
How could you show these women were credible? Well, first, the sheer number of accusers lent each one more credibility than she had alone. One woman was a lone accuser; dozens of women were a pattern.
But more importantly, those who accused Weinstein of assaults decades in the past, unlike some of their more contemporary peers, lacked documentation. Whereas some of the younger women wrote scathing memos to Weinstein’s production company or obtained settlements memorialized in writing, the 1970s-era survivors seemed to have nothing but their own haunting memories of the alleged crimes.
That is, until the Times asked them a series of critical questions: “At or around the time this happened to you, did you tell anyone? Who? When?” And when they revealed…
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