Carroll’s Day In Court

A significant MeToo Trial for us all

One of my followers recognized the difficult nature of the Carroll v Trump trial I have been covering, and suggested I be sure to take care of myself. I’m aware that it is stressful, and I had a level of exhaustion recently that was unfamiliar to me.

Why is this trial so fascinating and exhausting? First and most obviously, it is a serious acusation against a former president. Secondly, it is a trial that represents another significant moment in the MeToo movement. I think what E. Jean Carroll is doing is brave and altruistic. As she said during cross-examination, she is a woman of a certain generation who was taught to not make a fuss, endure and move on. Don’t upset anyone, everything’s fine.

But everything’s not fine. It’s gotten better for women, absolutely. The MeToo movement has helped us understand so much more about ourselves and our culture. I am younger than Ms. Carroll, yet I fully understand her growth over the post-second wave to the present. I remember entering NYC in the late 1970s, a time when there were magazine articles about “dressing for success,” and women “having it all.” I recall being grateful for Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, but as a young person, I believed things were fine.

That’s not to say Ms. Carroll thought things were fine in the 1980’s, it’s just that there was a measure of confidence to some women, myself included. We sensed that things were getting better, and wanted to be a part of it. What I didn’t realize back then, and what this trial exposes, is that while we operated with a can-do, confident, EQUAL feeling, internally we harbored, nutured and perfected nuanced maneuvers to operate in a world still run by men.

When Trump allegedly raped Ms. Carroll (I am of the opinion that he did), she was shattered. She lost so much, as she herself said in the trial. However, because of her training as a woman, she pulled herself together and claimed, “everything’s fine, nothing to see here, I will not cause a fuss.”

With Trump’s election and MeToo, Ms. Carroll felt it was time to unburden herself, to become who she should be. She finally had had enough. I understand this growth, even though I have been one of the lucky ones never to have been attacked. Perhaps its cumulitive, or simply getting older and wiser. And then he called her a liar, that was the final straw.

That someone of Mr. Trump’s fame could use his power to compeletly tear down a woman in 2023 is outrageous. And he continued to try as the trial began, posting on Truth Social and having his son post on Twitter. Judge Lewis Kaplan stopped that behavior dead in its tracks. To shine a light on this type of destructive manipulation is partly why this trial is so important.

Ms. Carroll has personally stated that she was desperate for her day in court, and she has had that. We as a culture need her day in court as well, to put a cap on the kind of public abuse and terror that was showered on her. And we need to see how nefarious the “training” that women have had over the years. It is so engrained in our upbringing that we don’t even know we are being trained in a system of behaviors to uphold the patriarchy.

in 2010, I delivered a TED talk called Drawing On Humor For Change. In it, I made the point that women follow cultural rules in order to survive. We have to know how to behave, dress, talk, navigate work, raise children and do so within the bounds of established norms because to do otherwise, we would not be able to succeed (survive). I point out that humor’s job is to turn the norms of our world upside down: that’s what elicits laughter. In Ms. Carroll’s work, she uses humor to point to things that are wrong in our culture. Ultimately, in overstepping unspoken boundaries, she was shut down.

I hope this trial gives Ms. Carroll her life and work back.