The Dressing Room

E. Jean Carroll's Rape Trial

This week, Donald Trump is on the legal ropes again in Manhattan, albeit in absentia, at writer E. Jean Carroll’s federal defamation and battery case related to what she says was a rape in a dressing room. 

The dressing room is a pivotal place for women in Trumpland. It’s where the metamorphosis from independent human to branded and hobbled happens, where women become Trumpy. Remember when Melania’s stylist reported that she was going to put a “glam room” in the White House?

Inside the dressing room, Trump wives and female acolytes brand themselves according to his regressive fantasy. They exchange authenticity, dignity and self-respect for access to power, money, modeling contracts. They engage in an antique way of being with men. (More on these transactional relationships in my book The Trump Women: Part of the Deal).

Carroll’s story is that one evening in late 1995 or early 1996, she ran into Donald as she was leaving the Manhattan luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman. Carroll agreed to go back inside the store with him to the lingerie department, where he said he wanted help to pick out a gift. She thought the lark would make a funny column item. Carroll, like most New Yorkers, regarded Trump as a benign media clown, ridiculed in Spy Magazine for his small hands, trash-talking women with Howard Stern on the radio.

Inside the dressing room, the joker became an ogre. Carroll’s story of being attacked with octopus fingers is similar to other accounts. Journalist Natasha Stoynoff says Trump slammed her against a wall, kissed and groped her at Mar a Lardo while she was dispatched to write a People story about Melania’s pregnancy. A New York woman, Jessica Leeds, had to fight off his hands while seated next to him on a plane. Stoynoff and Leeds are expected to testify as corroborating witnesses, along with local journalist Carol Martin, and author Lisa Birnbach, two women Carroll told about the incident when it happened.

The dressing room story matches reports from Miss Teen USAs of being invaded in changing rooms while undressed, brushing away the hands and turning from the tongue of the old man who owned the show. Higher heels, smaller bikinis, he brayed after buying the beauty pageants. (Here’s a handy timeline of his pageant creepiness.)

Since November of 2016, when voters slapped American women in the face, we’ve been on the back foot. A gaggle of humiliated women became the hobbled and silenced role models for American women and girls.

If he’s re-elected, they will all teeter back onstage.

It’s impossible for us to imagine a society in which men equally bear the burden of sexualization, spend hours in the dressing room, teeter around on spindle heels. New gender paradigms might offer a way forward - surely one reason why, after women’s health care, MAGAs are going after drag shows and LGBTQ rights.

Now, thanks to the efforts of a dressing room ogre, millions of American women and girls are being forced to bear children they can’t take care of. They will have to rely on a man - or family, or the state - for support.

They will have no choice but to practice their “part of the deal.”

The MAGA endgame is forcing women to submit to pregnancy as a duty to society. To fetal fanatics, abortion and contraception only enable women to exercise total hedonism, as if there is no difference between deciding when or whether to have children and French writer Michel Houllebecq’s amoral universe of sex tourists. You can hear this POV from Mary Harrington, a British writer who calls herself a “reactionary feminist” and who argues that the Pill equals “cyborg feminism.” (No mention of Viagra as cyborg masculinity.)

It is no exaggeration to say American women are in an actual state of emergency. State legislators (freakish beyond any character Margaret Atwood imagined) pass laws daily that will kill women. (Read about women bleeding out and nearly dying of infections in Texas and Florida here here and under state lockdown in Idaho here.)

As Carroll testifies, we can easily see why women who do report rapes rarely get a conviction. There are so many ways to be humiliated, forced to explain the indignities and coping defenses of female life. Trump lawyer Tacopina (lately seen spluttering on TV screens with the whites of his eyes visible above his pupils, sign of a madman) grilled Carroll on why she didn’t scream from inside the dressing room, to alert clerks and security. 

“I’m not a screamer. You can’t beat up on me for not screaming,” she replied.

“I’m not beating up on you. I’m asking you questions,” Tacopina said.

Carroll replied: “Women don’t come forward. One of the reasons they don’t come forward is because they’re always asked, why didn’t you scream?” She added that women are told, ‘You better have a good excuse if you didn’t scream.’

The me-too movement was a collective scream. It alerted HR offices and put predatory men on notice. The movement kicked some to the curb, but, as in the case of this former colleague of mine in the political reporting world, often just temporarily. 

Power is wily. That’s why it’s power. Throughout the rise of MAGA, we have been reminded again and again of the truth of this dictum: “Everything must change so everything can remain the same.” (This is a quote from the terrific book, The Leopard. I recommend.)

It will be poetic justice if women - E Jean Carroll’s case, and 34 felony charges related to Stormy Daniels’ hush money - bring about the leader’s downfall.

While we wait, the New York Abortion Access Fund helps women and girls get to states where basic women’s health care is legal. No one is turned away. Donate here.