After writing a book in which she accuses President Donald Trump of an act that can only be called rape, E. Jean Carroll said in a New York Times audio interview that she has not been raped, according to Breitbart News. The interview was broadcast on the Times podcast The Daily and also featured statements from the two friends she apparently told about the alleged assault by Trump.
Carroll wrote about the incident in her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. She claimed she encountered Trump in a retail store in New York in the mid-1990s and that he pulled down her tights and penetrated her in a dressing room.
Trump denies the incident ever took place and even said that he never met her, although a photo exists of him and then-wife Marla Maples talking to Carroll and her then-husband.
Carroll’s choice
“Every woman gets to choose her word. Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is ‘fight,’” she said in the interview.
“My word is not the victim word. I have not — I have not been raped,” she went on. “I have — something has not been done to me. I fought. That’s the thing.”
It was not clear whether Carroll realized that her words continued to muddy the waters of her allegation against Trump. In previous interviews, she said that rape was considered “sexy” by many people and that people had “fantasies” about it.
She also said she wouldn’t pursue rape charges against Trump because she thought it would disrespect women in other parts of the world who have been raped and tortured, including on the U.S. southern border.
Carroll’s intentions
What is Carroll trying to accomplish with her comments about the incident she describes with Trump? Is she trying to accuse the president of wrongdoing, or is she scrambling to back away from the media’s rabid interest in her accusation?
In her attempt to define what she says happened to her in terms that don’t make her look like a victim, she has robbed her story of much of its power. It has become impossible to tell whether she ever intended to make Trump’s alleged assault the huge story that it has become.
The only thing that is clear about this story is how truly baffling it has become. No physical evidence has been produced about the allegedly decades-old attack, for which Carroll can’t even pinpoint the year of its occurrence.
She does not appear to have been traumatized by the claimed encounter. On the contrary, she seems to have taken it in stride and gone on with life — if it ever really happened in the first place.
What should the public make of that?
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