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…
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