Trump Issues Another Despicable Denial of Sexual Assault: E. Jean Carroll Is “Not My Type”
President Trump has issued yet another despicable denial to the 24th woman accusing him of sexual misconduct. In response to longtime Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll telling The Cut that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-’90s, Trump says Carroll is “not my type.”
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type,” the president told The Hill in an Oval Office interview. “Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”
Let’s borrow Trump’s logic structure. Number one: The president of the United States, seated at the Resolute Desk, is responding to an accusation of sexual assault by Carroll (which was corroborated by two friends) by disparaging her appearance. In response to Carroll’s claim that Trump was “forcing his fingers around my private area” and thrusting his penis “halfway—or completely, I’m not certain—inside me,” Trump didn’t say he would never and has never pinned any woman against a dressing room wall and assaulted her. Instead, he said Carroll isn’t the type of woman he’d go after. He also claimed he’d never met Carroll—despite a photo published of them together.
Number two, and what’s perhaps worse: This isn’t even the first time Trump has resorted to insulting the appearance of a woman accusing him of assault. In fact, it’s one of his go-tos. In 2016, when Jessica Leeds told The New York Times that Trump groped her on an airplane in the ’80s (“He was like an octopus,” Leeds said, “his hands were everywhere”), Trump riled up a rally full of supporters by replying that Leeds “would not be my first choice.”
People writer Natasha Stoynoff also got the chauvinistic Trump treatment in 2016 after she shared a detailed accusation that Trump pushed her up against a wall and forcibly kissed during a 2005 interview at Mar-a-Lago, while pregnant Melania Trump rested upstairs. Trump denied her claim at a North Carolina rally, and declared, “Check out her Facebook page, you’ll understand.” The implication, of course, is that some women aren’t attractive enough to assault. (Like Carroll, Trump also denied knowing Stoynoff. Also like Carroll, he was photographed with her.)
It’s a terribly counterintuitive defense: arguing that you didn’t physically attack a woman, while proceeding to immediately verbally attack her. The more the president disparages the looks of his female accusers, the more he proves himself to be precisely the sort of person they claim him to be. If this is how Trump treats women in public—recall his long track record of calling women “fat,” “ugly,” “horseface,” “pig,” and “dog”—it’s not hard to imagine how he might regard them behind closed doors.
Carroll’s story reignites the calls for consequence—“Is rape an impeachable offense?” MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell rightfully asked on Twitter—and the familiar sense of hopelessness, not only over the fact that a multiply accused predator continues to run the country, but that he tears women down from the Oval Office. When will Trump ever learn? It will never happen. It will never happen, OK?
Originally Appeared on Vogue
