Calling all hags!
A brave woman's lawsuit against Trump is afoot.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
We know the argument well: Why would anyone possibly believe decades after the fact that [blank] woman was raped by [blank] man. Where is the proof?
Sometimes we get “lucky,” as in the case of E. Jean Carroll, whose civil battery and defamation suit against former President Trump begins today. She says she has physical evidence that implicates Trump in a sexual assault, in the form of a DNA sample (semen) she says he left on her dress while raping her in a fancy New York City department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. I remember those dressing rooms at Bergdorf Goodman on 58th and 5th — my mother loved to bore the crap out of me by forcing me to find whatever beige seat was available while she tried on overpriced clothing.
The mid-’90s was an era of false glitter and shiny things — it was an era in which blowhards like Trump reigned over NYC’s upper class social life with impunity. And, as we’ve seen, the bizarrely stretched era of at least one particular blowhard is still going strong. So when I say Carroll “got lucky,” I mean that she got lucky purely in the fact that she may have physical evidence to prove her claims against Trump in court. But, my god, anyone who thinks this woman who has sat quietly dealing with this assault on her body for decades is actually lucky, let’s just put a stop to that right now.
No woman wants to publicly say they’ve been sexually assaulted. Why would they when men (and the women who support them) trash anyone who dares to seek accountability?
A quick scan of Reddit threads about Carroll found:
Latest Trump-denouncer E. Jean Caroll [sic] has a book to shill. She would also like to put men in Gulags [sic].
It’s always these elderly women or women in their 40's [sic] and up that are looking to drag other women down with them and they try especially hard to frighten the younger ones away from men. There’s a definite trend amongst feminists that the most fanatical ones are the oldest, [sic] seems to be true of any long lived [sic] ideology though I guess.
If you’re a young woman don’t ever listen to women like this otherwise you will end up bitter and alone.
This hag is batshit crazy... But apparently so is everyone she comes in contact with.
A liar, an idiot, AND a psychopath. No wonder the liberals love her!
So, apologies to all my fellow batshit crazy hags out there, but, as for me, I’m going to hope young women and men will take a moment to hear me out — especially since I’m clearly an elderly woman in my 40s who has learned that every bad thing a man does is really my fault because I’m trying to frighten younger women with my fanatical ideology. Subversive!
One thing that has stood out to me over the years as I’ve reported on rape and torture in war zones is that never once — not ever — have I had a reader question the validity of a story I wrote about the torture of a man. Not when I’ve written about men in Ukraine being electrocuted or others in Syria being hung by their wrists. I never published a photo of these things; some of the time, I had no “proof.” So why is it so much more difficult for people to accept the violation of women as more than an attempt to bring down men? Rape, like torture, is a crime of violence and domination.
Listen, it’s not like I expect anything to change dramatically with Carroll bringing this case against the briefly most-powerful man on the planet. But I do commend her, unabashedly.
When a “hag” stirs up the courage to finally speak — let alone bring a public lawsuit against a famously powerful man — about their sexual assault, we should give them the respect they deserve as people who have been through a serious trauma. Particularly because others won’t. (Side note: I just want to find a way to say “hags” as many times as I can. Hags.)
Before anyone gets all “not all men,” I’m not saying that every single accusation of rape is true, but I am saying that the number of false reports of rape remains extraordinarily low — from 2 to 10 percent in multiple studies. Consider that the rate of perjury or false accusations in cases of violence is highest in child sex abuse cases (84 percent) and homicide cases (68 percent), according to the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California, Irvine.
I have spent years looking for statistics on the false reporting of violent crimes besides rape. I remember finding something years ago in which the FBI said that false reports of rape are consistent with false reports of other major violent crimes (2-8 percent). Yet, searching again now for “percentage of false reporting, violent crimes,” why is it that I can only find articles and data sets about false claims of rape? Is rape really considered that much more “interesting” in some messed up way that more researchers are studying it? Or are men looking to absolve themselves in crimes against (mostly) women by proving high levels of false reporting (which I’m still not finding)?
No matter what it is, there is clearly a fascination with proving us hags to be liars.
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