The Smiles of E. Jean Carroll
When women claim the script.
Friday, January 26, a New York jury ruled that Donald Trump owes E. Jean Carroll $83.3 M. The decision was unanimous. The decision will be appealed.
In our domestic experiment of post-misogyny, I frequently am caught up short by a challenge from my female partner, “why are you interrupting me?”
It’s a human question, really, a basic tenet of human communication: we come into a discussion with a verbal agenda, an expectation, an enrichment of understanding (or dismissal), a verbal intimacy, a twirl on the dance floor of conviviality. As humans, we are wired cognitively to either 1 Listen or 2 Speak. We can’t do both very well at the same time.
Trust me, I’ve tried. I was not successful; maybe you are. I think not.
So, it piqued my interest to attend recently the cultural moment of E. Jean. Carroll’s legal apotheosis, a correlate of ‘listen and speak,’ what one could call ‘claiming the script.’
Her smile tells all. The woman, in this public moment and witness is claiming the script.
Consider Cassidy Hutchinson’s tightened lips and arched eyebrows. They tell all.
In a similar, durable ‘listen and speak moment,’ recall Cassidy Hutchinson testifying before the J6 Committee two years ago. As were many, I was caught up, witnessing her ‘claiming the script.’ She had fired her Trump-aligned lawyer, opting for whomever the DC pool of legal eagles could come up with.
Barely revealing teeth, Ms. Hutchinson sat in front of a scrum of camera clicking photographers on auto speed and offered a wan smile, a resolute stare which said, “We will get through this.” If E. Jean Carroll’s smile recalls the Cheshire Cat, Cassidy Hutchinson eyebrow flexing recalls Alice, stamping her feet impatiently at the innuendo and nonsense surrounding her.
Not that E. Jean Carroll didn’t have her share of innuendo and nonsense, for nearly five years, thank you. On surface there is little comparison between the two except the off-stage bully male celebrant, dick in hand.
The venues are different. A city courtroom here, a lofty Congressional Hall, there. What is the same — bully notwithstanding — is the dispensation of a ‘public’ and a collective wisdom, called ‘conviction.’
‘Claiming the script’ is the business of conviction. In Carroll’s case it was convincing 7 men and 2 women, a soccer team. In Hutchinson’s case it was convincing a million plus viewers who have a penchant for a daytime glimpse of official Congress at work.
Both had to work hard to convince, excruciatingly so.
Cassidy Hutchinson writes in her memoir, that on January 6, 2021, she had about $200 in her checking account. For most of us, this brush with insolvency would make us retreat under the sheets. Find a nearby cave. However, Ms. Hutchinson, underpaid Ms. Hutchinson, broke Ms. Hutchinson, did not like what she heard and saw on January 6, so she remained clear-eyed and took notes.
We don’t know what E. Jean Carroll had in her checking account the day she encountered Donald Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. What we do know is that for five years she has been verbally assaulted by the now former President. ‘Vulnerable’ does not begin to describe the terror she feels.
A video clip plucked from a Nevada Trump rally on Saturday goes something like this…”well, I was a victim of sexual abuse, and it didn’t take me thirty years to come forward.”
How does one begin to speak to this kind of nonsense?
Both Carroll and Hutchinson suffered more than indignities. Both women were forced to occupy a public perversion, a cauldron of social ridicule, abuse and verbal assault. At risk were the institutions of power and prestige, the Office of the President and the rape swagger of a celebrated Manhattan Real Estate tycoon.
And a judicial system populated by a subset of the species. A distribution of power and social munificence carved from the pathway institutions — university law schools and K Street law firms, well-heeled clients and justice junkets. The assault on this distribution has a name: #metoo.
Both ladies were new to the #metoo movement or rather the #metoo was new to them. Though it took only two years for the MM (mainstream media’) to write off the Women’s March of January 2017, women judges, women prosecutors, and women who write about judges and judgments were kindling a public awakening.
Weinstein.
Epstein.
And now Trump.
The long-awaited institutional upside as a result of the Carroll jury verdict and the Hutchinson J6 Committee Testimony is that justice prevailed, a ‘justice’ at odds with the institutions, populated by male majorities and culture, sworn to uphold ‘justice.’
On trial, if you will, was not merely Trump but the refusal to abandon the script of inclusivity. That’s what these pioneers were beckoning us towards — a conviction.
With respect to the Las Vegas Trump rally-goer, this conviction takes time to replicate (1).
More than sixty years ago I was sexually molested by a boy’s prep school teacher, and the institution wardens keeping the school’s reputation intact are just getting around to sand blasting the perp’s name off a classroom building, dedicated in his memory.
We come out when it comes out. It takes time. Carroll and Hutchinson are bookends in this endeavor.
Listen.
January 30
Notes
1 A spin on this notion of time and conviction surfaced during the E. Jean Carroll testimony. Consider the following reporting from Dr. Robert Reich, posted January 26 on substack:
“In a ruling that hasn’t received nearly the attention it should, Judge Kaplan wrote (*),
The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understood the word ‘rape. Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.
*‘Judge Clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll,’ analysis by Aaron Blake, Washington Post, July 19, 2023
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