Every Detail in the E. Jean Carroll Case Is Proof of Why Rape Victims Don’t Come Forward

Donald Trump is on trial for rape. Every detail in the case thus far shows that things haven’t really changed since the #MeToo movement.

Writer E. Jean Carroll is suing Trump for defamation and sexual assault. Trump has rejected the rape allegation. He has yet to appear at the trial, which began earlier this week.

During cross-examination Thursday, Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina tried to show that Carroll was making her story up. “You were supposedly raped?” he asked early on.

“Not ‘supposedly.’ I was raped,” Carroll responded.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

Tacopina went on to ask her Thursday whether she screamed during the alleged assault. When Carroll said she didn’t, Tacopina repeatedly pressed her on the point.

“He raped me, whether I screamed or not,” Carroll replied, nearly shouting, according to reporters in the courtroom.

Carroll also said that if she had been lying, “I would say I was screaming my head off.” Maybe then more people would have believed her, she added.

Tacopina also asked Carroll why she only told two friends instead of going to the police. Carroll said that she was scared of what Trump might do to her, pointing out that “he has two tables full of lawyers here today.”

Carroll has at least some reason to be concerned. At least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault since the 1970s, all of which he has denied. He then went on to become president of the United States.

And the line of questioning in the case shows exactly why so many people, not just Carroll, hesitate to come forward after they have been sexually assaulted. Nearly 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported, according to a 2016 Justice Department report. Many survivors are afraid of retaliation—from both the perpetrator and society in general—as well as that their allegations will be distorted. Another major concern is simply that they won’t be believed.

The #MeToo movement was supposed to be a watershed moment, when society began pushing back on sexual assault and the people who perpetrate it. Instead, people like Carroll are accused of lying for money or told their story isn’t believable because they didn’t react a certain way. They’re also attacked all over again, as if what happened to them is their fault.

Carroll told the court Thursday that she logged on to Twitter in the morning and found a slew of comments calling her a “liar,” a “slut,” “ugly,” and “old.” But then, getting emotional, she said, “I couldn’t be more proud to be here.”

Democrats are literally just trying to advocate for people’s basic civil rights. But from Tennessee to Montana, Republican lawmakers have twisted ethics and decorum rules to attack them for doing so. The latest? A Nebraska Democratic lawmaker is under an ethics investigation for having a transgender child.

State Senator Megan Hunt is now under attack for having a “conflict of interest” because she has a transgender son.

The investigation comes from a complaint from Omaha lawyer David Begley, who claims that Hunt is financially implicated in the fate of a bill that would ban gender-affirming health care for anyone under the age of 19. Bagely writes that Hunt and her son would have a “more than average chance of obtaining Medicare coverage if the bill fails.” For her part, Hunt has said she has already tried four times to receive care for her son, to no avail; Nebraska’s Medicaid policy does not currently cover gender-affirming care anyhow.

Of course, the complaint is ridiculous. Every bill that lawmakers address is one they are implicated in; after all, they are also members of the society those bills would impact and change.

Senator Wendy DeBoer put it quite simply. “Every time we have a tax bill, I’m a taxpayer. So I may be involved in that every time. We have a bill that involves families, well, I have a family. So I may be involved,” she told Nebraska Public Media. “Every time we have a bill on basically anything in here, I’m involved because I care about my state. I care about the people in my state, and I’m involved with them, just like Senator Hunt is.”

While some Republicans have supported Hunt against the ethics complaint, the senator says that is not enough.

What’s happening in Nebraska is a parallel of what we saw unfold in Tennessee and Montana earlier this month. Tennessee Republicans expelled two Black Democrats for standing in solidarity with thousands of people protesting against gun violence after a school shooting. Montana Republicans censured the state’s first and only transgender legislator for speaking out against vicious attacks on transgender lives, barring her from the House floor for the rest of the legislative session.

By the way, Begley, the complainant and self-purported former Democrat, once told then-presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg that he should “just tell the Black people of South Bend to stop committing crime and doing drugs.” He has also called for arming teachers and making gun ownership even more widespread in a country where there are more mass shootings than days in a year. Just a few weeks ago, he called Nebraska Democrats “Jacobins” and part of the “cults” of “Net Zero Carbon” and “Transgenderism.”

New court documents in the case against an air national guardsman suspected of leaking classified intelligence documents reveal he had a history of racist and violent behavior. So how did the 21-year-old get top secret security clearance?

Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s intelligence wing, was arrested earlier this month for allegedly leaking documents that include information on Russian and Ukrainian strategies in the ongoing war, as well as intelligence on Canada, China, Israel, South Korea, the Indo-Pacific military theater, and the Middle East. He is believed to have posted them on a Discord server in early March.

In a memo released late Wednesday, ahead of a detention hearing, the Department of Justice revealed that Teixeira had a “troubling” history of making racist and violent comments. He was suspended from high school in March 2018 when a classmate overheard him talking about weapons, “including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” the documents said.

The documents also show that later that year, Teixeira applied for a gun license but was denied because local police were concerned over the comments that got him suspended. The military conducted a full background check on Teixeira when he joined, and yet apparently these details raised no red flags when he was granted a high-level top secret security clearance known as TS-SCI (Top Secret—Sensitive Compartmented Information).

The Discord server where Teixeira shared the documents was created for a group he led. The other members were mostly young men and teenagers who had bonded during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic over their shared interest in guns, racist memes, and video games.

The Washington Post reported that a video of Teixeira shows him at a shooting range. He shouts a series of racial and antisemitic slurs before firing repeatedly at a target. Even the name of the Discord server, Thug Shaker Central, is a racist reference. Group members were encouraged to “to hurl epithets and crude jokes,” according to the Post.

Teixeira’s arrest has raised questions about how the junior airman was able to access such highly classified information. As more details about his background emerge, the bigger question seems to be why he was able to access any classified information at all.

The death of talk show host Jerry Springer has brought back painful memories for many transgender people, amid a rapidly rising tide of anti-trans legislation in Republican-led states.

Springer died Thursday at the age of 79, a family spokesperson told TMZ. The former politician and comedian hosted the controversial talk show Jerry Springer for almost three decades, during which the show became known for featuring violence, nudity, and profanity.

The show was particularly notorious for its exploitative treatment of trans women, especially trans women of color—which is ironic, considering that his family has asked fans to commit an act of kindness to honor him, rather than send flowers. Jerry Springer regularly featured segments that dehumanized trans women, referred to them by slurs, and portrayed them as deceptive.

Trans women, as well as allies, spoke out on Twitter after Springer’s death was announced about how much he and his treatment of trans people affected their sense of self worth. They pointed out that his show was often some of the only trans representation they saw in popular culture when they were younger.

Springer’s show was canceled in 2018, but it faced regular criticisms for transphobia before that. He was vocal in his support for the LGBTQ community, but on the show, things looked a little different.

Although Springer had pushed back on the accusations of transphobia, his show and its audience always mocked trans people when they appeared as guests, including in the offensively named segment “Trannies Twerk It Out.” Presenting one community as a joke stood in stark contrast to the rest of his show, online magazine Queerty pointed out.

“The laughter, the pointing, the hooting and hollering—how can this be perceived as supporting the transgender community?” Queerty editor Dan Tracer wrote in 2015.

Springer’s death comes amid a wave of state-level anti-trans legislation that only seems to be picking up speed. The Republican-led measures range from banning trans people from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender to banning gender-affirming care for minors and even letting state officials take trans teens away from guardians who give them such care.

Just Wednesday, Montana House Republicans voted to censure Zooey Zephyr, the state’s only trans lawmaker, after she gave a fiery speech warning them that banning gender-affirming care would increase suicide among trans minors.

Every single Senate Republican and Joe Manchin voted explicitly to make our air dirtier—and Dianne Feinstein helped them do it.

On Wednesday, by a vote of 50–49, Senate Republicans and Manchin passed a resolution to nullify an Environmental Protection Agency rule that seeks to reduce toxic air pollution from heavy-duty vehicles.

The EPA estimates the rule will prevent up to 2,900 deaths, 6,700 hospital and emergency room visits, and 18,000 cases of childhood asthma. Beyond the vitality benefits, the rule has material ones too: 78,000 fewer lost days of work, 1.1 million fewer lost school days for kids, $29 billion in annual net benefits.

And because of Feinstein’s absence, and Manchin’s continued cowardice, corporate-wedded Republicans were able to advance the bill to cancel all those benefits.

To be clear, Republicans are entirely at fault for so doggedly pursuing deregulation, day in and day out. In the wake of Norfolk Southern’s toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, we are reminded that this is the same political movement that has had senators like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and figureheads like Tucker Carlson appropriating populist bona fides to pretend they care about protecting everyday people from corporate malfeasance and environmental degradation. But when it comes down to it, it’s all smog and mirrors.

But the point of an opposition party is indeed to serve as the opposition. And with Feinstein’s absence, and Manchin’s insistence on showing himself to be just as captured by corporate greed as the next conservative, Democrats are not, in fact, serving as meaningful opposition to a corrupt political movement.

Democrats can’t confirm judges—which, as should be apparent by now, is crucial for instilling any lasting power to protect the basic civil liberties and rights of millions of people against right-wing assaults. Now Democrats can’t even protect low-bar environmental protection rules from being assailed by industry-captured Republicans. What next?

Sure, the resolution may not survive a White House veto, but consider what this kind of dynamic signifies more broadly.

As Alex Pareene wrote in TNR, “I​​f you don’t want to run on big ideas, you should be obligated to run on making shit work, and that should require a commitment to actually making shit work. It is incumbent on those who reject revolution to make the current system not require it.”

If this current system is to even be perceived as superficially functional, Feinstein must either return to Washington yesterday or exit the Senate yesterday. Judges must be confirmed, and regulations meant to protect people must not only be legislatively affirmed but become proud rallying calls for Democrats to boast of to voters.

Democrats, the opposition to Republicans, must prove themselves to be exactly that, not just rhetorically but substantively. The system either works or it doesn’t—and if it doesn’t, don’t blame people for wanting to upend it.