https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ak/615664/
‘I Moved on Her Very Heavily’: Part 1
E. Jean Carroll
14-18 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. Which might seem surprising, until you remember Trump’s modus operandi: He escapes the consequences of one outrage by turning our focus to another, in perpetuity. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Who are the people who came forward to say that Trump treated them exactly as he described: as fungible collections of body parts to paw at whenever it suited his purposes? Why did the women decide to tell their stories, and what has life been like since? Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; the president has denied all of the women’s allegations, and the White House declined to comment for this story.
Natasha Stoynoff, the subject of this first installment, likens herself and her fellow accusers to the proverbial canaries in the coal mine: among the first to warn the world about the essential nature of the 45th president of the United States. Read Part 2 and Part 3 here.
Jamie Campbell
Norman Mailer is so amazed at how hard Natasha can hit that whenever she stays with him and his wife, Norris, in Provincetown, she and Norman put on the gloves and they spar on the back porch. Each new boxing trainer tells Natasha that she should turn professional. Her punch is between hospitalization and murder. Her nickname is Boom Boom. Boom Boom? One can imagine the rest.
So when Natasha flies down to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, for People magazine and its 3,734,536 readers in 2005, and Trump says that he wants to “show her something” and she follows him into a room off the patio and Trump shuts the door and bangs her up against the wall and shoves his tongue down her throat, we all know what happens next. Trump lunges at her again, and Natasha delivers a sweet little uppercut that lands just under his heart, and as he emits a comical “Ooof,” she buffs his jaw with her trademark “powder puff”—a punch so hard that Trump slides to the floor and flops on the marble before being carried away by the butler. Okay, I grant you. That is only what Natasha says she wishes she’d done. Trump does shovel his tongue down her throat, but Natasha doesn’t slug him. It is, however, a blow that Natasha and I love imagining. So, reader, are you ready to find out what really happens?
Around 2:30 p.m. on December 27, 2005, the journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who is tall and strong, 5 foot 11 in her Converse platforms, champagne-haired, jolly, with sly blue eyes and a golden-cream complexion, sits down on a couch on the patio near the Mar-a-Lago pool. She is here to interview Donald Trump and a seven-months-pregnant Melania on the occasion of the couple’s first anniversary and the coming birth of their child.
Alyssa Shelasky, who wrote about Natasha in New York magazine last year, when her story was part of The Pussy Grabber Plays at Manhattan’s Public Theater, says: “Stoynoff was my mentor when I worked at People magazine, about 10 years ago. She was the brilliant, hilarious, confident, and warm writer who got all the good assignments because Larry Hackett, the editor in chief at the time, knew she was the best.”
Natasha (second from left) at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the interview (Troy Word / People)
Fifteen minutes into the sit-down (“Trump is frustrating to interview,” Natasha says. “If all you need are sound bites, he’s easy. He’s got his one sentence ready for you. If you want something deeper, that’s a challenge. Because he doesn’t do deep”), Melania goes upstairs to change wardrobe and prepare for the next photo. Trump turns to Natasha. “He says he wants to show me a room—‘the beautiful, tremendous room’—or something in the room.”
“Natasha!” I cry.
She is in a cabin in the woods in the mountains of Quebec; I am in a cabin in the woods in the mountains of New York, and we are Zooming. “Woman!” I yell. “It didn’t occur to you that going into a room alone with Donald Trump was stupid?”
“No” (taken aback). “Not at all! I mean” (laughing in disbelief) “I just ... I mean, no!”
“It didn’t occur to me either,” I say. Indeed, I walked right into that Bergdorf’s dressing room like an idiot.
“And don’t forget,” Natasha says, “the wife is upstairs changing. Nothing led me to think he would do such a thing.”
So Natasha—who is intensely curious like all good journos—smiles and tells Trump, sure, she’d like to see the room. She stands up (black boots, black pants, black cotton crewneck sweater), and Trump leads her inside.
“I remember it being a dark room,” Natasha says. “But there are windows, so not too dark. We go in. I’m looking around, wondering what he wants to show me. I hear the door close.” She points behind herself. “I turn around. And—” She presses her hand to her chest. “He’s right at me, pushing me against the wall.”
“Did you hit your head?”
She looks off to the side and ponders.
“I don’t recall hitting my head.”
“Do you recall him grinding against you?”
Natasha frowns and leans into the Zoom screen.
“Riding?”
“Grinding.”
She leans back, repulsed. “Grinding.”
She closes her eyes.
“Oh God! That is a question I never thought I’d hear.”
“When he had me up against the wall in the dressing room,” I tell her, “I was aware of it.”
She tries again to picture the scene and shakes her head. “I think my hands went up immediately.” She demonstrates by holding her hands, palms out, at shoulder level. “So there wasn’t space.”
“I remember his weight,” I say. “He leans on you like an oversexed mastodon.”
“If he did, I can’t remember it,” she replies.
And I say: “Maybe you just didn’t feel it.”
Pause.
I raise my eyebrows.
Natasha looks at me, tilting her head. It takes a moment. Then she falls forward and practically rolls on her Zoom table.
Oh yes, surprised reader, we accusers scream with laughter.
Nineteen, or 25, or 43 women have come forward to accuse Trump of ogling, grabbing, groping, mauling, or raping them. The women say they dodged, ran, froze, ducked, resisted, or laughed at him; and we all stood up, spoke out, got dragged through the mud, belittled, and besmirched. Natasha calls us the “whistleblowers.” She wrote a blistering op-ed in The Washington Post last November pointing out how it is women who warned the world what to expect from Trump. (Mary Trump is just the latest.)
Natasha, wearing her own gloves, with Mike Tyson in Gleason’s Gym, circa 2004. She says she didn’t hurt him “much.” (Courtesy of Natasha Stoynoff)
Freedom-fighting is in Natasha’s blood. She is “100 percent Eastern Bloc, honey!” Although she holds dual citizenship in Canada and America, Natasha’s mother is from Macedonia, and her father is the descendant of a 6-foot-7-inch Macedonian revolutionary—“my whole family are like giants”—who had his head whacked off and carried through town by the Greeks in 1913. But the main thing to remember about Natasha Stoynoff, as I turn up the sound on our Zoom and pour myself a glass, is this: Men are always shocked at how hard she can hit.
“I’m just getting my wine, Natasha,” I call offscreen.
“Absolutely.”
“Join me?”
“I’ve got to work ’til two this morning,” Natasha tells me. She now writes books and screenplays, including the best-selling Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter From the Terrifying Cult Nxivm (with the Dynasty actor Catherine Oxenberg), which was made into a Lifetime movie, and The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale, which is currently being developed for TV. “So if I drink now?” Natasha says. “Forget it.”
I raise a toast to the “accusers around the globe,” one of whom, Karena Virginia, left her husband’s dinner on the stove in New Jersey and balled the jack into Manhattan to drink vodka cocktails with Natasha and me one Sunday night last year about this time.
“So …” I say, settling behind my computer again, “the butler comes in the room when Trump is shoving his tongue …”
“And the butler says, ‘Melania’s on her way down,’” Natasha says, “and he leads us outside back to our original positions on the couch on the patio. And after we sit down and the butler leaves, Trump says”—she lowers her voice—“‘You know we’re going to have an affair.’”
“Lord!”
“And he says we gotta go have steak at Peter Luger’s. That’s his big thing. He says it to me a couple of times. ‘You ever been to Peter Luger’s?’ And what was the second wife’s name? Marla! He says, ‘Well, you know what Marla said, the cover of the New York Post, best sex she ever had.’ And bear in mind, I’m here to write a story about their happy one-year anniversary! I’ve been asking questions about how happy they are, how excited they are about the baby, and meanwhile he’s telling me we’re going to have an affair. And then Melania sits down and I start asking questions, and it is a complete lie. I mean, everything he is saying now in the interview I know is a complete lie.”
When Natasha is a kid, 16, 17, she bribes a doorman at the Toronto Four Seasons Hotel with her homemade chocolate-chip cookies and asks him to alert her when Madonna shows up. The cookies are so amusing, the doorman can’t help himself. He squeals on Bono, Beatty, and Bowie.
Because who can say no to a shy, gawky, street-hockey-playing kid in a white jumpsuit, her hair fixed in a “long Marilyn,” giggling and batting her eyes and holding up her little Sure Shot camera, saying, “Please, Mr. Nicholson, may I take your picture?”
“They’d be like, ‘Okay! Okay!’ So by the time I’m 18, I’m getting all these shots none of the other photographers could get. They think they’re giving a shot to a nice kid. And then I rush down to the Toronto Star. ‘Here’s my film!’ And I get paid for it! And it’s on the front page the next day!”
The kid, who looks like she’s coming to paint your garage on account of the ever-present white jumpsuit, soon starts asking Duran Duran, the Cars, and Huey Lewis questions. She writes up the interviews, publishes them in her school paper, goes to Ryerson University, studies journalism, works as a writer at the Toronto Star, then has her own column at the Toronto Sun, and wham-bam-bing in 1997 finds herself living in a giant loft with a wood-burning fireplace in Manhattan, a block from Bloomingdale’s, going to cocktail things, throwing big dinners (“I’m Slavic—I like feeding people”), writing about the actors and directors she’s admired her whole life, and walking to work at People magazine in the Time & Life Building, across from Radio City Music Hall.
This is during the heyday of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” and “Most Beautiful People,” and by heyday, I mean just after Nora Ephron says she could get on a plane with her People magazine, buckle her seat belt, and read it start to finish before her flight took off, and just before Ephron says she is no longer able to identify a single celebrity in it. It is one of America’s most-read magazines, and by 2004, Natasha (who would eventually be named one of the “Most Intriguing People of 2016”) has become People’s Trump person. She attends Donald and Melania’s wedding reception, covers all the Apprentice stuff, and wants to do her best with the anniversary story.
Natasha tells her Ryerson journalism professor Paul McLaughlin about the incident with Trump the evening it happens, and a decade later, her professor gives an interview to Lawrence O’Donnell about it. Altogether, six people corroborate her story.
In a broad denial refuting several accusers (the man is so busy insulting women, he can’t seem to differentiate among us), Trump says that he never met Natasha. Natasha and People eventually respond by publishing a photo of Natasha and Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Natasha says that “for an instant,” she fantasized about filing a story describing exactly what Trump did to her. “But,” she says, “it was never a realistic option, because that’s not the kind of story People publishes. Except for very rare occasions, the reporter is fly-on-the-wall invisible.”
When the first People colleague whom Natasha tells suggests that they go together to inform the editor, Larry Hackett, about what Trump did, Natasha remembers that her reaction was “No, no, no. I couldn’t fathom it. I was embarrassed and ashamed by what happened. I wanted the whole awful incident to go away. I didn’t want to cause problems.”
In a strange coincidence of fantasies, when Natasha came forward and wrote about what really occurred in an October 12, 2016, People story, Hackett bared his ink-stained soul two days later in a Washington Post op-ed, picturing what he would have done if Natasha had told him at the time.
For a second there, I imagined a scene of Ben Bradlee–esque outrage, calling out the swine for his behavior and striking a blow for reporters everywhere. But in reality, I would probably have simply killed the story that Stoynoff had gone to Palm Beach to report. I would have then called Trump’s public relations operatives, told them about their boss’s bad behavior and agreed to a truce of mutual silence. In the end, few people would have learned of the event, we’d have had to fill a few more pages in the next issue, and Trump would have avoided any public embarrassment.
Before she arrives at Mar-a-Lago, Natasha, who played on the basketball team, the volleyball team, and the field-hockey team as a girl, and who, like many athletes, suffers neck and shoulder aches, calls for an appointment with the Mar-a-Lago spa’s masseuse. No dice. However, during her interview with the newlyweds, Trump suggests that Natasha visit the spa. Natasha replies that the masseuse is all booked up.
“Before I knew it,” Natasha tells me, “Trump goes and comes back and says, ‘I spoke to the guy. You’re in at 8 a.m. tomorrow. He’s gonna come in an extra hour early for you. The top guy!’
“I did not want Trump to do that for me. And I just knew there was no way I could get there at eight in the morning. I’m not a morning person. So the morning comes and I race to get there. I’m always late. Everybody in my family is late. My grandfather missed the Titanic because he was 10 minutes late. And that morning, I’m 20 minutes late. The massage guy is panicked. I assume it’s because I’m late. So I say, ‘Look, I’m sorry! I’ll pay for the whole hour. Don’t worry about it!’”
But the masseuse, by now a heap of shattered nerves, replies: “No, it’s not that. Mr. Trump was here waiting for you.”
Read Part 2 of this series.
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
I Moved on Her Very Heavily
Moderator: admin
Re: I Moved on Her Very Heavily
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... wo/615892/
Two Women, Two Breasts, Two Decisions
E. Jean Carroll
16-20 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. Which might seem surprising, until you remember Trump’s modus operandi: He escapes the consequences of one outrage by turning our focus to another, in perpetuity. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; a White House spokesman denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.” Read Part 1 and Part 3 here.
Photograph by Gillian Laub
Fifty or so miles out of New York City, in a hamlet so rich, it makes Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach look like a John Mellencamp video, there lives a beautiful woman by the name of Karena Virginia. Today is a brilliant Monday. The sun pours down like Fort Knox gold. Karena has conducted an angel sanctuary over the weekend—connecting her friends (she calls clients “friends”) with the supernatural beings she believes are as real as each of us—and later today she is teaching friends to breathe in tune with the ocean waves for “Yoga on the Beach.”
When I pull up in my car, Karena is standing in the road. To welcome me, she raises the brim of her enormous beach hat and holds a pose on one foot, lifting her arms to the gods like a forest sprite. If William Blake—the poet and artist who conversed with angels in the nude—could see Karena in her turquoise sarong and turquoise bikini bottom with the circle clasp on the hip, her long, golden-brown hair streaming down her back, he would paint her with wings.
Donald Trump once spots Karena at the U.S. Open tennis tournament as she waits for a car, but he doesn’t paint her. It is 1998, and she recalls that he says to his male pals, “Hey, look at this one. We haven’t seen her before.”
“I am wearing a short, black, sleeveless A-line dress,” continues Karena, who can also tell me the exact skirt, sweater, and shoes she is wearing when she meets her husband a year later. “I call my friend immediately after I get in the car and tell her what happened and ask if she thinks it is because my dress is too short. I remember thinking my protective Italian father would have been appalled at my outfit, because Trump, as he is walking toward me with his entourage, says: ‘Look at those legs.’ It’s my fault that I allow him to grab my arm without my pulling away. And then he goes further”—she demonstrates, quickly sliding her knuckles back and forth on the right side of her bust—“and he grabs my breast.”
Now let us leave Karena and visit a handsome apartment on the Upper West Side. It is 21 years later, June 2019. A lawyer sits in an armchair suckling a newborn. The child is about the size of a basset hound—he weighed nearly 10 pounds at birth—and the lawyer, a peach-complexioned looker (yes, reader, another pretty woman, but we are dealing with a man who, you’ll recall, denies that he attacks women by claiming they’re not “his type”), glances up from the giant baby. “This is off the record,” she announces to her companions, several women who are being interviewed about sexual assault.
The lawyer is not taking part in the discussion, but her story is so on point that she couldn’t help but chime in. The journalist is The New York Times’ Megan Twohey, who in 2016 reported some of the earliest sexual-misconduct allegations against Trump and who, along with Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story.
“Of course,” Twohey says, off the record.
And the lawyer says: “Trump grabbed my boob.”
So this is a few words about Trump and a few more words about breasts. One of the breasts belongs to a woman who, three weeks before the 2016 election, comes forward and warns the world not to vote for a man who gropes women. The other belongs to a woman who has stayed quiet. Which woman is happier with her decision? Is it the yoga teacher/angel connector, or the attorney? We must go back and forth in time to find out.
I meet Karena in 1994, when we both work for Roger Ailes at his NBC cable network, America’s Talking. (It later becomes MSNBC, and Roger goes on to create Fox News.) I am the host of the live, one-hour Ask E. Jean show. Karena, a theater major straight out of Ithaca College, is starring in one of Roger’s experiments called Cable Crossings, a 30-second soap opera airing “in the cracks” between the talk shows.
I tell you with a straight face that Karena is not a normal human. For instance, Karena finds most things on Earth pleasant. She has seen angels since she was a little girl. One of her yoga workshops, for women who are trying to get pregnant, is called “Mommies and Miracles.” She believes “energy is everything.” She texts with Oprah (with whom she collaborated on a seven-part 2015 documentary about spirituality across the globe called Belief). I suspect that Karena’s spleen has wings raised for flight, and, yes, she has been told by dullards that she needs to “get a grip.”
So in the countdown to the 2016 election, when America is caught in the Groundhog Day time loop of women coming forward to tell of Trump—the truffle pig—rooting around their bodies, Karena is in the family room on the chaise lounge (“One day I want to toss that thing! It brings back PTSD”), watching the 6:30 news and admiring the courage on display. At the same time she is thinking, I could never tell my story. I could never do it, and feeling deeply ashamed.
Then one day a woman—Karena can’t remember who—comes on TV and calls Trump’s accusers liars. Karena’s very corpuscles tighten. She starts shaking. She cannot understand why women don’t believe other women. Karena says to herself: “I teach women to be empowered through yoga. I tell women they are goddesses of the divine, and here I can’t even talk about the truth?”
The next night she confesses her shame to a perfect stranger at a party in the Rainbow Room for the New York screening of La La Land. The stranger tells her, “You must stand with these women!” After teaching her morning yoga class the next day, Karena calls an attorney recommended by a friend. The attorney is Gloria Allred. “I had no clue who she was,” Karena says. Twenty hours later, she is sitting behind a phalanx of mics in a hotel conference room and reading her eight-minute, 39-second statement to the world press.
You remember it. She is as firm as Kamala Harris and chokes up like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Joan of Arc at the stake could not have been more dramatic.
It is a disaster. “The fallout from the press conference,” Karena says, “is a million times—a million times—worse than being groped by the president.”
The scene now shifts to Santa Monica in 2006. The lawyer with the peach complexion is booming her new BMW—a law-school graduation present from her mother—up the circular drive of a Santa Monica Beach hotel, when who should emerge through the front door?
Oh my God, Donald Trump, thinks the lawyer, who agrees to tell her story as long as she isn’t named. Fine, whatever—like, he’s old. It is about five months after Trump pushed Natasha Stoynoff up against a Mar-a-Lago wall and shoved his tongue down her throat, according to Stoynoff. The sun is about to set. Trump lasers his eyes through the lawyer’s windshield.
She pulls up to the valet-parking stand. She alights from the car, smooths her black sheath (her new lawyer dress!), and, as her three friends tumble out of the vehicle in a merry burst, ready to celebrate their last day at law school—excited to be alive, thrilled to be dressed up and arriving in such a hot ride—and as the valet is saying, “I’m sorry, the hotel bar is closed for a private event,” Trump appears next to her.
“He comes in from the side,” says the lawyer, who is Zooming with me. The giant baby is now a year old and is nearly the size of a race-horse jockey—“and he comes around and puts his meaty arm around me and his hand goes …”
The lawyer places her own hand on the top part of her breast. “And so I am immediately uncomfortable,” she says, “and he is like, ‘Hey, you want to get into the bar? I can get you in. Just you. Not your friends.’ And at this point, he is just rubbing my breast.”
I am sorry, reader, I must ask: “The entire breast?”
“The top of the breast, the nipple. He just, like …” She kneads her breast like it’s a ball of pie dough.
“And I had this whole-body visceral reaction,” she says. “I was like, I have to get out of here right now. I didn’t say a word. I turned around. I still had my keys. I got in the car and I was like, ‘Get in, everyone. We’re going.’ They hadn’t seen it happen. They were facing toward the hotel. We did not talk about it. We fell out of touch pretty quickly after passing the bar. I was in shock.” (The White House called the allegations “an anonymously sourced smear.”)
When I try to determine the timelines of Melania Trump giving birth in Manhattan and her husband feeling up a young law-school grad at a Santa Monica hotel, the lawyer emits a bitter, sarcastic chuckle. “I don’t think Melania being perfect or giving birth would stop Trump,” she says. “I don’t think anything would stop him. He probably did the same thing to 10 different women that night. That’s the thing. I was not special.”
Though Karena is as ethereal as Thoreau’s wood nymph, the paradox is that the life she has created for herself with her lawyer husband and two children is chock-full of good cheer and success because she is also tough-minded and confident as a businessperson. In 2001, when her “kids are babies,” she starts teaching prenatal yoga, then yoga with moms and babies, then yoga for women who want babies. How good is she? Gloria Allred gets a message after the press conference from one of Karena’s former clients—excuse me, friends—to pass the following news on to Karena: “I was in your ‘Mommies and Miracles’ workshop, and I am now a mother!”
Before we start talking about the hideous aftermath of her press conference, as a sort of warm-up, I ask Karena: “What do you wish you would’ve done when Trump knuckled your breast?”
I ask because I know that I’m not the only Trump accuser to imagine punching him repeatedly between mandible and eye socket.
Karena pauses a moment to ponder. We are sitting outside her friend’s house in two of the most comfortable deck chairs ever built by human hands, on an emerald lawn, by a blue pool, near a willow so weeping that it is practically moaning, and we are overlooking—get this—a canal down which float rich people on pontoons, kayaks, and canoes.
Karena turns to me with her answer.
I lean in, hoping she is about to describe a groin kick that sends Trump rolling over and over across the DecoTurf of Arthur Ashe Stadium until he is picked up by the ball girls, stuffed in a bag, and carried away.
She says: “I would look Trump in the eyes and ask, ‘What kind of man are you?’”
Yogis! Bah.
Gloria Allred comforts Karena at the press conference, October 20, 2016. (Jemal Countess / Getty)
“Did you think about coming forward before the 2016 election?” I ask the lawyer.
“I thought about it a bunch,” she says. “But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a rape. It was a forcible touch. I wondered: Is it worth associating my name with that?”
“Forever,” I say.
“Forever. And as a woman, if you ever come forward with any allegation, it’s like you’re tainted. They pick apart your work. They pick apart your appearance.” (Indeed. Tributes to my devastating beauty have been offered daily since I accused Trump of raping me. This tweet, from @blumrln75—a.k.a. “God Fearing American, Florida saltwater cowboy”—is one of my favorites: “He [Trump] wouldn’t do you with Joe Biden’s wiener!”)
“So are you glad you didn’t come forward in 2016?” I ask the lawyer.
“I was worried about my career. It’s already been hard enough to get where I am as a woman.”
“Do you want to come forward—now—on the record?”
The lawyer graduated with distinction from a prestigious midwestern university before she went to law school in Los Angeles; she is now married to a writer. In 2019, she joined a new law firm, when the couple moved from New York to California.
“That’s the thing,” says the lawyer, trying to frown, but a grin zings across her face. “I’m up for partner!”
For Karena, the consequences of speaking up are swift and severe. “Did you think you were going to get killed?” I ask her.
“Oh, yeah,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because people were telling me that they were going to kill me. I was getting death threats.”
After the press conference, four close friends take up arms and quickly begin deleting the hundreds of hate messages on Karena’s YouTube channel, her Instagram and Facebook accounts, and her yoga video on Amazon. “I couldn’t look at any messages from anybody,” she says. “Even the good ones. I just needed to hide. I started to feel like my skin was burning. No way of explaining it, unless you’re in it. It was as if there were millions of little needles in my skin.”
“You walk down your driveway,” I say, “and open your mailbox—?” This is the driveway that leads to the house that is nestled in one of the boskiest Republican enclaves on the Eastern Seaboard.
“I got clippings cut out of the newspaper with daggers drawn through my eyes. They come in with, like, ‘You’re going to die.’ And swears and awful things. My husband and I took them to the police. Brutal.”
And the reaction from her neighbors?
“The people in the town,” says Karena, with about as much aspersion as she is capable of, “are very elegant.” In other words, the shoulder Karena receives from the town is so cold, she needs an ice pick to leave the house. “Lots of silence.”
Do you want to hear my theory about why the response to her press conference is so savage? (A) She looks like she’s just left a lawn party at Jay Gatsby’s. (B) People think the tears she sheds—and dew rolling down an anemone could not fall more gracefully—are because she’s making a big deal about Trump seizing her breast. In fact, she is overwhelmed by “the cameras and the clicking,” as she puts it, and she feels unaccountably moved by the thought of all the other women who have suffered in silence. And what with the pressure inherent in publicly accusing a man who is running for president of the United States of something sexual—of course she cries. Who wouldn’t?
Karena says she loses clients, has to cancel a big book-signing at Barnes & Noble, and is dropped or not invited back to do “wellness” appearances on TV shows such as The Doctors, though the show’s producers deny that. (“It would have been a huge launching pad for my brand. I still sometimes think about it. Then I remember I have integrity.”) She gets an email from a famous retreat center canceling her planned appearance, lest Trump supporters feel uncomfortable. She reads the email and calls her husband. “I’m crying. I am gasping for air, and I say, ‘This (gasp) just (gasp) happened (gasp). I ruined my career!”
Does she regret coming forward then?
“My whole entire life, I’ve been considered super sensitive. But the past three and a half years have been a time of real, true empowerment for me. When I die, I’m going to know that I stood up for women. And you know what? It’s been awful seeing how impulsive Trump has been as president. So in the end, my close friends have said to me, ‘Karena, can you imagine if you had never said anything and had to watch this?’”
So there you have it. Both Karena and the lawyer are happy with their decisions.
And by the by, the lawyer does, in fact, tell one person about what Trump did to her before the 2016 election. She tells her mom. I know her mother. She is a doctor, a scientist, an abortion-rights woman, a southern belle, and she loves her daughter. Guess whom her mom votes for in 2016, knowing he has assaulted her daughter? That’s right. She votes for Trump: “He’s so good at business.”
Her mother is a busy woman, however. She may not have heard about all of the women Trump allegedly manhandled. “So I am speaking to support the women,” Karena tells me. “For those people who were not able to hear it then, I hope you hear it now. Because the only reason I am putting myself in this situation again is because this cannot happen again.”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
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Two Women, Two Breasts, Two Decisions
E. Jean Carroll
16-20 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. Which might seem surprising, until you remember Trump’s modus operandi: He escapes the consequences of one outrage by turning our focus to another, in perpetuity. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; a White House spokesman denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.” Read Part 1 and Part 3 here.
Photograph by Gillian Laub
Fifty or so miles out of New York City, in a hamlet so rich, it makes Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach look like a John Mellencamp video, there lives a beautiful woman by the name of Karena Virginia. Today is a brilliant Monday. The sun pours down like Fort Knox gold. Karena has conducted an angel sanctuary over the weekend—connecting her friends (she calls clients “friends”) with the supernatural beings she believes are as real as each of us—and later today she is teaching friends to breathe in tune with the ocean waves for “Yoga on the Beach.”
When I pull up in my car, Karena is standing in the road. To welcome me, she raises the brim of her enormous beach hat and holds a pose on one foot, lifting her arms to the gods like a forest sprite. If William Blake—the poet and artist who conversed with angels in the nude—could see Karena in her turquoise sarong and turquoise bikini bottom with the circle clasp on the hip, her long, golden-brown hair streaming down her back, he would paint her with wings.
Donald Trump once spots Karena at the U.S. Open tennis tournament as she waits for a car, but he doesn’t paint her. It is 1998, and she recalls that he says to his male pals, “Hey, look at this one. We haven’t seen her before.”
“I am wearing a short, black, sleeveless A-line dress,” continues Karena, who can also tell me the exact skirt, sweater, and shoes she is wearing when she meets her husband a year later. “I call my friend immediately after I get in the car and tell her what happened and ask if she thinks it is because my dress is too short. I remember thinking my protective Italian father would have been appalled at my outfit, because Trump, as he is walking toward me with his entourage, says: ‘Look at those legs.’ It’s my fault that I allow him to grab my arm without my pulling away. And then he goes further”—she demonstrates, quickly sliding her knuckles back and forth on the right side of her bust—“and he grabs my breast.”
Now let us leave Karena and visit a handsome apartment on the Upper West Side. It is 21 years later, June 2019. A lawyer sits in an armchair suckling a newborn. The child is about the size of a basset hound—he weighed nearly 10 pounds at birth—and the lawyer, a peach-complexioned looker (yes, reader, another pretty woman, but we are dealing with a man who, you’ll recall, denies that he attacks women by claiming they’re not “his type”), glances up from the giant baby. “This is off the record,” she announces to her companions, several women who are being interviewed about sexual assault.
The lawyer is not taking part in the discussion, but her story is so on point that she couldn’t help but chime in. The journalist is The New York Times’ Megan Twohey, who in 2016 reported some of the earliest sexual-misconduct allegations against Trump and who, along with Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story.
“Of course,” Twohey says, off the record.
And the lawyer says: “Trump grabbed my boob.”
So this is a few words about Trump and a few more words about breasts. One of the breasts belongs to a woman who, three weeks before the 2016 election, comes forward and warns the world not to vote for a man who gropes women. The other belongs to a woman who has stayed quiet. Which woman is happier with her decision? Is it the yoga teacher/angel connector, or the attorney? We must go back and forth in time to find out.
I meet Karena in 1994, when we both work for Roger Ailes at his NBC cable network, America’s Talking. (It later becomes MSNBC, and Roger goes on to create Fox News.) I am the host of the live, one-hour Ask E. Jean show. Karena, a theater major straight out of Ithaca College, is starring in one of Roger’s experiments called Cable Crossings, a 30-second soap opera airing “in the cracks” between the talk shows.
I tell you with a straight face that Karena is not a normal human. For instance, Karena finds most things on Earth pleasant. She has seen angels since she was a little girl. One of her yoga workshops, for women who are trying to get pregnant, is called “Mommies and Miracles.” She believes “energy is everything.” She texts with Oprah (with whom she collaborated on a seven-part 2015 documentary about spirituality across the globe called Belief). I suspect that Karena’s spleen has wings raised for flight, and, yes, she has been told by dullards that she needs to “get a grip.”
So in the countdown to the 2016 election, when America is caught in the Groundhog Day time loop of women coming forward to tell of Trump—the truffle pig—rooting around their bodies, Karena is in the family room on the chaise lounge (“One day I want to toss that thing! It brings back PTSD”), watching the 6:30 news and admiring the courage on display. At the same time she is thinking, I could never tell my story. I could never do it, and feeling deeply ashamed.
Then one day a woman—Karena can’t remember who—comes on TV and calls Trump’s accusers liars. Karena’s very corpuscles tighten. She starts shaking. She cannot understand why women don’t believe other women. Karena says to herself: “I teach women to be empowered through yoga. I tell women they are goddesses of the divine, and here I can’t even talk about the truth?”
The next night she confesses her shame to a perfect stranger at a party in the Rainbow Room for the New York screening of La La Land. The stranger tells her, “You must stand with these women!” After teaching her morning yoga class the next day, Karena calls an attorney recommended by a friend. The attorney is Gloria Allred. “I had no clue who she was,” Karena says. Twenty hours later, she is sitting behind a phalanx of mics in a hotel conference room and reading her eight-minute, 39-second statement to the world press.
You remember it. She is as firm as Kamala Harris and chokes up like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Joan of Arc at the stake could not have been more dramatic.
It is a disaster. “The fallout from the press conference,” Karena says, “is a million times—a million times—worse than being groped by the president.”
The scene now shifts to Santa Monica in 2006. The lawyer with the peach complexion is booming her new BMW—a law-school graduation present from her mother—up the circular drive of a Santa Monica Beach hotel, when who should emerge through the front door?
Oh my God, Donald Trump, thinks the lawyer, who agrees to tell her story as long as she isn’t named. Fine, whatever—like, he’s old. It is about five months after Trump pushed Natasha Stoynoff up against a Mar-a-Lago wall and shoved his tongue down her throat, according to Stoynoff. The sun is about to set. Trump lasers his eyes through the lawyer’s windshield.
She pulls up to the valet-parking stand. She alights from the car, smooths her black sheath (her new lawyer dress!), and, as her three friends tumble out of the vehicle in a merry burst, ready to celebrate their last day at law school—excited to be alive, thrilled to be dressed up and arriving in such a hot ride—and as the valet is saying, “I’m sorry, the hotel bar is closed for a private event,” Trump appears next to her.
“He comes in from the side,” says the lawyer, who is Zooming with me. The giant baby is now a year old and is nearly the size of a race-horse jockey—“and he comes around and puts his meaty arm around me and his hand goes …”
The lawyer places her own hand on the top part of her breast. “And so I am immediately uncomfortable,” she says, “and he is like, ‘Hey, you want to get into the bar? I can get you in. Just you. Not your friends.’ And at this point, he is just rubbing my breast.”
I am sorry, reader, I must ask: “The entire breast?”
“The top of the breast, the nipple. He just, like …” She kneads her breast like it’s a ball of pie dough.
“And I had this whole-body visceral reaction,” she says. “I was like, I have to get out of here right now. I didn’t say a word. I turned around. I still had my keys. I got in the car and I was like, ‘Get in, everyone. We’re going.’ They hadn’t seen it happen. They were facing toward the hotel. We did not talk about it. We fell out of touch pretty quickly after passing the bar. I was in shock.” (The White House called the allegations “an anonymously sourced smear.”)
When I try to determine the timelines of Melania Trump giving birth in Manhattan and her husband feeling up a young law-school grad at a Santa Monica hotel, the lawyer emits a bitter, sarcastic chuckle. “I don’t think Melania being perfect or giving birth would stop Trump,” she says. “I don’t think anything would stop him. He probably did the same thing to 10 different women that night. That’s the thing. I was not special.”
Though Karena is as ethereal as Thoreau’s wood nymph, the paradox is that the life she has created for herself with her lawyer husband and two children is chock-full of good cheer and success because she is also tough-minded and confident as a businessperson. In 2001, when her “kids are babies,” she starts teaching prenatal yoga, then yoga with moms and babies, then yoga for women who want babies. How good is she? Gloria Allred gets a message after the press conference from one of Karena’s former clients—excuse me, friends—to pass the following news on to Karena: “I was in your ‘Mommies and Miracles’ workshop, and I am now a mother!”
Before we start talking about the hideous aftermath of her press conference, as a sort of warm-up, I ask Karena: “What do you wish you would’ve done when Trump knuckled your breast?”
I ask because I know that I’m not the only Trump accuser to imagine punching him repeatedly between mandible and eye socket.
Karena pauses a moment to ponder. We are sitting outside her friend’s house in two of the most comfortable deck chairs ever built by human hands, on an emerald lawn, by a blue pool, near a willow so weeping that it is practically moaning, and we are overlooking—get this—a canal down which float rich people on pontoons, kayaks, and canoes.
Karena turns to me with her answer.
I lean in, hoping she is about to describe a groin kick that sends Trump rolling over and over across the DecoTurf of Arthur Ashe Stadium until he is picked up by the ball girls, stuffed in a bag, and carried away.
She says: “I would look Trump in the eyes and ask, ‘What kind of man are you?’”
Yogis! Bah.
Gloria Allred comforts Karena at the press conference, October 20, 2016. (Jemal Countess / Getty)
“Did you think about coming forward before the 2016 election?” I ask the lawyer.
“I thought about it a bunch,” she says. “But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a rape. It was a forcible touch. I wondered: Is it worth associating my name with that?”
“Forever,” I say.
“Forever. And as a woman, if you ever come forward with any allegation, it’s like you’re tainted. They pick apart your work. They pick apart your appearance.” (Indeed. Tributes to my devastating beauty have been offered daily since I accused Trump of raping me. This tweet, from @blumrln75—a.k.a. “God Fearing American, Florida saltwater cowboy”—is one of my favorites: “He [Trump] wouldn’t do you with Joe Biden’s wiener!”)
“So are you glad you didn’t come forward in 2016?” I ask the lawyer.
“I was worried about my career. It’s already been hard enough to get where I am as a woman.”
“Do you want to come forward—now—on the record?”
The lawyer graduated with distinction from a prestigious midwestern university before she went to law school in Los Angeles; she is now married to a writer. In 2019, she joined a new law firm, when the couple moved from New York to California.
“That’s the thing,” says the lawyer, trying to frown, but a grin zings across her face. “I’m up for partner!”
For Karena, the consequences of speaking up are swift and severe. “Did you think you were going to get killed?” I ask her.
“Oh, yeah,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because people were telling me that they were going to kill me. I was getting death threats.”
After the press conference, four close friends take up arms and quickly begin deleting the hundreds of hate messages on Karena’s YouTube channel, her Instagram and Facebook accounts, and her yoga video on Amazon. “I couldn’t look at any messages from anybody,” she says. “Even the good ones. I just needed to hide. I started to feel like my skin was burning. No way of explaining it, unless you’re in it. It was as if there were millions of little needles in my skin.”
“You walk down your driveway,” I say, “and open your mailbox—?” This is the driveway that leads to the house that is nestled in one of the boskiest Republican enclaves on the Eastern Seaboard.
“I got clippings cut out of the newspaper with daggers drawn through my eyes. They come in with, like, ‘You’re going to die.’ And swears and awful things. My husband and I took them to the police. Brutal.”
And the reaction from her neighbors?
“The people in the town,” says Karena, with about as much aspersion as she is capable of, “are very elegant.” In other words, the shoulder Karena receives from the town is so cold, she needs an ice pick to leave the house. “Lots of silence.”
Do you want to hear my theory about why the response to her press conference is so savage? (A) She looks like she’s just left a lawn party at Jay Gatsby’s. (B) People think the tears she sheds—and dew rolling down an anemone could not fall more gracefully—are because she’s making a big deal about Trump seizing her breast. In fact, she is overwhelmed by “the cameras and the clicking,” as she puts it, and she feels unaccountably moved by the thought of all the other women who have suffered in silence. And what with the pressure inherent in publicly accusing a man who is running for president of the United States of something sexual—of course she cries. Who wouldn’t?
Karena says she loses clients, has to cancel a big book-signing at Barnes & Noble, and is dropped or not invited back to do “wellness” appearances on TV shows such as The Doctors, though the show’s producers deny that. (“It would have been a huge launching pad for my brand. I still sometimes think about it. Then I remember I have integrity.”) She gets an email from a famous retreat center canceling her planned appearance, lest Trump supporters feel uncomfortable. She reads the email and calls her husband. “I’m crying. I am gasping for air, and I say, ‘This (gasp) just (gasp) happened (gasp). I ruined my career!”
Does she regret coming forward then?
“My whole entire life, I’ve been considered super sensitive. But the past three and a half years have been a time of real, true empowerment for me. When I die, I’m going to know that I stood up for women. And you know what? It’s been awful seeing how impulsive Trump has been as president. So in the end, my close friends have said to me, ‘Karena, can you imagine if you had never said anything and had to watch this?’”
So there you have it. Both Karena and the lawyer are happy with their decisions.
And by the by, the lawyer does, in fact, tell one person about what Trump did to her before the 2016 election. She tells her mom. I know her mother. She is a doctor, a scientist, an abortion-rights woman, a southern belle, and she loves her daughter. Guess whom her mom votes for in 2016, knowing he has assaulted her daughter? That’s right. She votes for Trump: “He’s so good at business.”
Her mother is a busy woman, however. She may not have heard about all of the women Trump allegedly manhandled. “So I am speaking to support the women,” Karena tells me. “For those people who were not able to hear it then, I hope you hear it now. Because the only reason I am putting myself in this situation again is because this cannot happen again.”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
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Re: I Moved on Her Very Heavily
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... -3/616201/
Donald Trump Is Waiting for You in First Class
E. Jean Carroll
12-15 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Carroll’s lawsuit took a dramatic turn this week, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the president’s defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.” Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Photograph by Rosie Brock
Midsummer twilight, and Jessica Leeds and I are letting down what’s left of our hair. Jessica confesses that one time she interviews with a computer company, and afterward she hears that all everybody is talking about is whether or not she was wearing a bra. (She was.) Then I confess that one time I buy a ticket to Johannesburg and a coxcomb from the South African consulate makes me sit on his lap before he agrees to give me a visa. What else do we confess? Well, let me just say that if you have never Zoomed with a silver-haired, soigné 78-year-old woman who describes what it is like being strapped in a seat on a Braniff flight with a future president of the United States trying to fasten his lips on her like a 6-foot-3 suckfish, well, in my opinion, reader, you have not lived, let alone Zoomed, at all.
But before we board that Braniff flight, we must first deal with another matter. Again and again we see Jessica, one of the first women to publicly accuse Trump of sexual assault in 2016, on the front page of The New York Times or sitting for an interview with Anderson Cooper—and what do we see?
“I know that if the story gets any attention, the first thing Trump will say is that I’m not pretty enough,” Jessica says. “I know instinctively that’s what he’s going to say.”
I snort like the empress of Blandings Castle.
Trump, in fact, yammers about Jessica’s accusations at a rally, and hoots, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice!”
How did Jessica know? Because Jessica is an old bat. Old bats are the best. I am an old bat myself. We old bats don’t kid ourselves.
“I want to tell everyone,” Jessica says. “In my 30s, I’m not bad looking. I certainly never compete in any beauty contest, but I am pretty enough. Thank you.”
So for the honor of Jessica Leeds and old bats everywhere, here is a photo of Jessica taken around the time that I’m going to tell you about. (Not that she isn’t a handsome woman still, don’t ya know.)
It is 1979, 1980. Jessica is sailing across the sky, heading back to New York from Dallas. If she has caught a Braniff flight—and as Jessica remembers, it probably is Braniff—her plane will be painted Perseus green or mercury blue, her seat will be full-grain leather, her flight attendant will be clad in Halston, and Jessica will find a complimentary mini-pack of cigarettes on her tray with her free drinks. This is before she becomes a stockbroker, and she is earning $17,000 a year as a salesperson for a company that supplies newsprint to publications like The Washington Post. Her firm is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the old Condé Nast building. “It’s very posh,” Jessica says. “And we are posh.”
Jessica in 1979 (Courtesy of Jessica Leeds)
“Do you remember what you’re wearing on the flight, Jessica?”
“I have my best suit,” Jessica says. “A brown tweed. I have a blouse that is a satiny fabric, shiny, and paisley print. Oh, I love that suit! And my hair is dark, dark brown. I think I look terrific.”
“What color is the blouse?”
“Silvery, with brown and red. It’s a fabulous outfit. It really is. I hang on to it for quite a while, but—”
She lowers her head and looks at me with her splendid dark-hazel eyes. “I never … wear … it … again.”
“So you get on the plane …”
“I get on the plane and go to the back and take my seat. And I remember watching the stewardess walking down the aisle, and she says to me, ‘Would you like to come up to first class?’”
In the 1970s, 1980s, it is impossible to surprise a woman: “It never occurs to me not to say yes—it had happened to me before,” Jessica tells me.
“Me too,” I say. You too, reader?
“I accept the fact,” says Jessica, flashing a sarcastic look from under her brows, “that I’m entertainment for the big honchos up in first class.”
“Ahh, Jessica,” I say. “People may not understand what we’re talking about.”
What we are talking about is how things used to be: about buying a ticket, putting on our best clothes, and boarding a cocktail party heading for New York or Chicago or Miami or any jazzy city, U.S.A. The party lacks zip unless somebody very rich or very pretty is present. Because to fly 1,500 miles without a beautiful woman next to you is like sitting in a restaurant without being served an entrée.
Men in first class will size up the female passengers before boarding and hold a brief conference with the check-in crew. Or, alternatively, a helpful flight attendant on a jumbo jet to L.A. will simply stand in the aisle next to me waving people away and rearranging the seating chart so that an extremely tall chap with hair like greased felt can have the spot by me. And, after the plane takes off, following the meal, the chap can show me a photo of his private plane and then show me a photo of his Rolls-Royce, and then show me his erection.
“Trump may have asked the flight attendant to go and fetch you,” I say.
“It could be,” Jessica says.
“So you come walking up to first class—”
“I recall he introduces himself. The name means nothing to me.”
It wouldn’t. Not in 1979 or 1980. Jessica is from Missouri. Her father is a cattle buyer for Oscar Mayer. Her mother, who divorces her dad when Jessica is little, is the executive secretary for the Springfield city manager, and, Jessica says, “she runs the town.” Jessica grows very tall, very quickly, towering over everybody in school, and, until she flunks fifth grade, nobody knows she can’t see the blackboard or the words in her books. Her older brother has been reading everything to her, and Jessica has been memorizing what he reads to her, going to school, and faking it. The day she puts on her new glasses and walks to school and sees the leaves on the trees: “The whole world opens up. It is amazing! Amazing!” She wins a partial scholarship (tuition and books) to Northwestern University, majors in speech and drama, and, finding herself out of money, finishes up at Southwest Missouri State. She gets a job with an early computer-programming company, then moves on to the paper company. She lives in Connecticut, and though she is flying in and out of New York airports, Jessica is not aware of the levels, the ranks, the spheres of New York society that Trump, a young rat out of Queens, is chewing his way through.
“I introduce myself,” Jessica says, “and he is perfectly reasonable when I first sit down. He’s blond, tall—you know, a good-size man—but I don’t remember being overwhelmed by his looks. Then we take off, and they serve a wonderful meal with real linen and real food. And you know? It is delightful. Really delightful. What do we talk about? We talk about him. He doesn’t ask me any personal questions. I know very few men who ever ask personal questions. They don’t want to know the answers. And I have my book. And he has nothing to read, and when they come and pick up the trays and everything, within a short amount of time—all of a sudden—he is on me.”
“Does he try to kiss you first?”
“Yes. Yes … Yeah.” She glances away from the screen with a revolted wince.
“Does he say anything?”
“He didn’t say a word. He was too busy trying to kiss me.”
“Does he move the armrest between you?”
“I don’t remember. All I remember is all of a sudden, he is on me.”
Jessica is ladylike. Therefore, allow me—for I also have experience with Trump—to say in plain English what I believe Trump is about to do. I believe he will go straight for the crotch, this calumny Don who tells Anderson Cooper three times in 2016’s second presidential debate that he has never kissed or groped a woman without consent.
“It’s like he’s got four extra hands,” Jessica says. “He’s grabbing my breasts. He’s trying to kiss me. I’m trying to get his hands off me. And this struggle”—the very data on the Zoom screen seems to shiver as Jessica recalls the scene—“it’s when he starts putting his hand up my skirt that I get a jolt of strength and manage to wiggle out of the seat. I grab my purse and storm to the back of the plane.”
Let’s cut to the transcript:
E. Jean: Now wait. Trump puts his hand on your leg and slides it up your skirt?
Jessica: Exactly.
E. Jean: Does he make it all the way up to your panties?
Jessica: No, no.
E. Jean: Because by this time you are starting to stand up?
Jessica: Right. I am on the aisle, so I have an out.
E. Jean: Does anyone offer to help you?
Jessica: The guy across the aisle, his eyes are as big as saucers. I keep thinking, Why don’t you say something? [Chuckling.] That’s when I realize it is only me who can rescue me.
E. Jean: Some women freeze in a situation like this. They freeze, or they appease. You certainly don’t freeze.
Jessica: No. But I certainly don’t say anything.
E. Jean: Did you laugh? [I’m picturing Jessica fighting the big orangutan in a small cage.]
Jessica: I don’t recall laughing, no. I take it seriously. This is a real, physical attack. I can recall men propositioning me and laughing, but not with someone as physical as Trump.
E. Jean: Let’s try to figure this out, Jessica. The question before us is: Why does Trump do this? He’s gotta know he’s not going to have intercourse with you right there on the plane, right? What does Trump think he’s going to gain? Do your manifold charms cause him to lose control of himself?
Jessica: I think he is bored. Nothing is happening, you know, so let’s grab a little pussy.
And there you have it.
Although regretting that she had not “planted my fist right into the man-on-the-plane’s nose—I think I really could’ve broken it,” Jessica moves on. Something happens a year or two later that brings back the plane and parks it forever in the hangar of her brain.
The event occurs after Jessica leaves the paper company and just before she aces every question in her Bache & Co. interview by answering as if she is a man, viz: “My Boy Scout leader’s opinion means more to me than my mother’s.” She goes on to pass the Series 7: General Securities Representative Qualification Exam and becomes a stockbroker with Bache, which is later bought by Prudential and becomes Prudential-Bache. These are the days when Jessica has a great little apartment in a brownstone on East 83rd, before she runs into fellow broker Buddy Leeds in the 86th Street subway station (reader, she marries him), and is helping out at a gala for the Humane Society of New York. The event is at Saks Fifth Avenue, and she is wearing a Mary McFadden dress in taxi-cab yellow. “I mean,” Jessica says, “I am meeting Geoffrey Beene, I am meeting Bill Blass, and Mary McFadden comes up and says, ‘That’s my dress!’ It is a fabulous, fabulous evening.
“Then Trump and his wife, Ivana, come in. She is very pregnant. He looks at me when I hand him his table assignment. And I look at him and I think, I remember you. And he stands there and stares at me, and he says, ‘I remember you. You’re the cunt from the airplane.’”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
Donald Trump Is Waiting for You in First Class
E. Jean Carroll
12-15 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Carroll’s lawsuit took a dramatic turn this week, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the president’s defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.” Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Photograph by Rosie Brock
Midsummer twilight, and Jessica Leeds and I are letting down what’s left of our hair. Jessica confesses that one time she interviews with a computer company, and afterward she hears that all everybody is talking about is whether or not she was wearing a bra. (She was.) Then I confess that one time I buy a ticket to Johannesburg and a coxcomb from the South African consulate makes me sit on his lap before he agrees to give me a visa. What else do we confess? Well, let me just say that if you have never Zoomed with a silver-haired, soigné 78-year-old woman who describes what it is like being strapped in a seat on a Braniff flight with a future president of the United States trying to fasten his lips on her like a 6-foot-3 suckfish, well, in my opinion, reader, you have not lived, let alone Zoomed, at all.
But before we board that Braniff flight, we must first deal with another matter. Again and again we see Jessica, one of the first women to publicly accuse Trump of sexual assault in 2016, on the front page of The New York Times or sitting for an interview with Anderson Cooper—and what do we see?
“I know that if the story gets any attention, the first thing Trump will say is that I’m not pretty enough,” Jessica says. “I know instinctively that’s what he’s going to say.”
I snort like the empress of Blandings Castle.
Trump, in fact, yammers about Jessica’s accusations at a rally, and hoots, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice!”
How did Jessica know? Because Jessica is an old bat. Old bats are the best. I am an old bat myself. We old bats don’t kid ourselves.
“I want to tell everyone,” Jessica says. “In my 30s, I’m not bad looking. I certainly never compete in any beauty contest, but I am pretty enough. Thank you.”
So for the honor of Jessica Leeds and old bats everywhere, here is a photo of Jessica taken around the time that I’m going to tell you about. (Not that she isn’t a handsome woman still, don’t ya know.)
It is 1979, 1980. Jessica is sailing across the sky, heading back to New York from Dallas. If she has caught a Braniff flight—and as Jessica remembers, it probably is Braniff—her plane will be painted Perseus green or mercury blue, her seat will be full-grain leather, her flight attendant will be clad in Halston, and Jessica will find a complimentary mini-pack of cigarettes on her tray with her free drinks. This is before she becomes a stockbroker, and she is earning $17,000 a year as a salesperson for a company that supplies newsprint to publications like The Washington Post. Her firm is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the old Condé Nast building. “It’s very posh,” Jessica says. “And we are posh.”
Jessica in 1979 (Courtesy of Jessica Leeds)
“Do you remember what you’re wearing on the flight, Jessica?”
“I have my best suit,” Jessica says. “A brown tweed. I have a blouse that is a satiny fabric, shiny, and paisley print. Oh, I love that suit! And my hair is dark, dark brown. I think I look terrific.”
“What color is the blouse?”
“Silvery, with brown and red. It’s a fabulous outfit. It really is. I hang on to it for quite a while, but—”
She lowers her head and looks at me with her splendid dark-hazel eyes. “I never … wear … it … again.”
“So you get on the plane …”
“I get on the plane and go to the back and take my seat. And I remember watching the stewardess walking down the aisle, and she says to me, ‘Would you like to come up to first class?’”
In the 1970s, 1980s, it is impossible to surprise a woman: “It never occurs to me not to say yes—it had happened to me before,” Jessica tells me.
“Me too,” I say. You too, reader?
“I accept the fact,” says Jessica, flashing a sarcastic look from under her brows, “that I’m entertainment for the big honchos up in first class.”
“Ahh, Jessica,” I say. “People may not understand what we’re talking about.”
What we are talking about is how things used to be: about buying a ticket, putting on our best clothes, and boarding a cocktail party heading for New York or Chicago or Miami or any jazzy city, U.S.A. The party lacks zip unless somebody very rich or very pretty is present. Because to fly 1,500 miles without a beautiful woman next to you is like sitting in a restaurant without being served an entrée.
Men in first class will size up the female passengers before boarding and hold a brief conference with the check-in crew. Or, alternatively, a helpful flight attendant on a jumbo jet to L.A. will simply stand in the aisle next to me waving people away and rearranging the seating chart so that an extremely tall chap with hair like greased felt can have the spot by me. And, after the plane takes off, following the meal, the chap can show me a photo of his private plane and then show me a photo of his Rolls-Royce, and then show me his erection.
“Trump may have asked the flight attendant to go and fetch you,” I say.
“It could be,” Jessica says.
“So you come walking up to first class—”
“I recall he introduces himself. The name means nothing to me.”
It wouldn’t. Not in 1979 or 1980. Jessica is from Missouri. Her father is a cattle buyer for Oscar Mayer. Her mother, who divorces her dad when Jessica is little, is the executive secretary for the Springfield city manager, and, Jessica says, “she runs the town.” Jessica grows very tall, very quickly, towering over everybody in school, and, until she flunks fifth grade, nobody knows she can’t see the blackboard or the words in her books. Her older brother has been reading everything to her, and Jessica has been memorizing what he reads to her, going to school, and faking it. The day she puts on her new glasses and walks to school and sees the leaves on the trees: “The whole world opens up. It is amazing! Amazing!” She wins a partial scholarship (tuition and books) to Northwestern University, majors in speech and drama, and, finding herself out of money, finishes up at Southwest Missouri State. She gets a job with an early computer-programming company, then moves on to the paper company. She lives in Connecticut, and though she is flying in and out of New York airports, Jessica is not aware of the levels, the ranks, the spheres of New York society that Trump, a young rat out of Queens, is chewing his way through.
“I introduce myself,” Jessica says, “and he is perfectly reasonable when I first sit down. He’s blond, tall—you know, a good-size man—but I don’t remember being overwhelmed by his looks. Then we take off, and they serve a wonderful meal with real linen and real food. And you know? It is delightful. Really delightful. What do we talk about? We talk about him. He doesn’t ask me any personal questions. I know very few men who ever ask personal questions. They don’t want to know the answers. And I have my book. And he has nothing to read, and when they come and pick up the trays and everything, within a short amount of time—all of a sudden—he is on me.”
“Does he try to kiss you first?”
“Yes. Yes … Yeah.” She glances away from the screen with a revolted wince.
“Does he say anything?”
“He didn’t say a word. He was too busy trying to kiss me.”
“Does he move the armrest between you?”
“I don’t remember. All I remember is all of a sudden, he is on me.”
Jessica is ladylike. Therefore, allow me—for I also have experience with Trump—to say in plain English what I believe Trump is about to do. I believe he will go straight for the crotch, this calumny Don who tells Anderson Cooper three times in 2016’s second presidential debate that he has never kissed or groped a woman without consent.
“It’s like he’s got four extra hands,” Jessica says. “He’s grabbing my breasts. He’s trying to kiss me. I’m trying to get his hands off me. And this struggle”—the very data on the Zoom screen seems to shiver as Jessica recalls the scene—“it’s when he starts putting his hand up my skirt that I get a jolt of strength and manage to wiggle out of the seat. I grab my purse and storm to the back of the plane.”
Let’s cut to the transcript:
E. Jean: Now wait. Trump puts his hand on your leg and slides it up your skirt?
Jessica: Exactly.
E. Jean: Does he make it all the way up to your panties?
Jessica: No, no.
E. Jean: Because by this time you are starting to stand up?
Jessica: Right. I am on the aisle, so I have an out.
E. Jean: Does anyone offer to help you?
Jessica: The guy across the aisle, his eyes are as big as saucers. I keep thinking, Why don’t you say something? [Chuckling.] That’s when I realize it is only me who can rescue me.
E. Jean: Some women freeze in a situation like this. They freeze, or they appease. You certainly don’t freeze.
Jessica: No. But I certainly don’t say anything.
E. Jean: Did you laugh? [I’m picturing Jessica fighting the big orangutan in a small cage.]
Jessica: I don’t recall laughing, no. I take it seriously. This is a real, physical attack. I can recall men propositioning me and laughing, but not with someone as physical as Trump.
E. Jean: Let’s try to figure this out, Jessica. The question before us is: Why does Trump do this? He’s gotta know he’s not going to have intercourse with you right there on the plane, right? What does Trump think he’s going to gain? Do your manifold charms cause him to lose control of himself?
Jessica: I think he is bored. Nothing is happening, you know, so let’s grab a little pussy.
And there you have it.
Although regretting that she had not “planted my fist right into the man-on-the-plane’s nose—I think I really could’ve broken it,” Jessica moves on. Something happens a year or two later that brings back the plane and parks it forever in the hangar of her brain.
The event occurs after Jessica leaves the paper company and just before she aces every question in her Bache & Co. interview by answering as if she is a man, viz: “My Boy Scout leader’s opinion means more to me than my mother’s.” She goes on to pass the Series 7: General Securities Representative Qualification Exam and becomes a stockbroker with Bache, which is later bought by Prudential and becomes Prudential-Bache. These are the days when Jessica has a great little apartment in a brownstone on East 83rd, before she runs into fellow broker Buddy Leeds in the 86th Street subway station (reader, she marries him), and is helping out at a gala for the Humane Society of New York. The event is at Saks Fifth Avenue, and she is wearing a Mary McFadden dress in taxi-cab yellow. “I mean,” Jessica says, “I am meeting Geoffrey Beene, I am meeting Bill Blass, and Mary McFadden comes up and says, ‘That’s my dress!’ It is a fabulous, fabulous evening.
“Then Trump and his wife, Ivana, come in. She is very pregnant. He looks at me when I hand him his table assignment. And I look at him and I think, I remember you. And he stands there and stares at me, and he says, ‘I remember you. You’re the cunt from the airplane.’”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
Re: I Moved on Her Very Heavily
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... -4/616435/
And Then Donald Trump Walked Into the RV
E. Jean Carroll
18-23 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Carroll’s lawsuit took a dramatic turn two weeks ago, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the president’s defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated and rejected by the American people.” Read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here.
Stills from the 2016 video of Alva and Donald Trump (Courtesy of Alva Johnson)
You are looking at slightly out-of-focus 2016 images taken from a 15-second video of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and a campaign staffer, Alva Johnson. Before people see the tape, Trump attorneys say that their client does not kiss Alva. After the tape is released, the lawyers say that what Trump is doing to Alva is an “interaction,” a word they will employ in pleadings before the judge presiding over the federal suit in which Alva claims that Trump “kisses her without her consent.”
Reader, we will now leave the video so we can learn who kisses whom, who sues whom, and why this kind of fight with a man is not new for Alva.
Nydia Blas
“What does Trump smell like?”
“I don’t know.”
“When he comes in at you.”
“I—I—”
“Stop and think.”
“I don’t—”
Alva lowers her eyes and tries to smell Trump in her mind’s nostril. “Sweat—maybe?” Alva’s nose ring quivers like a damselfly. “Makeup? Cosmetics? It’s a cramped RV and it’s raining, and people are wet, and there are a bunch of guys who’ve been there since 6 o’clock in the morning setting up chairs and tables and so I—really—just—freeze.”
Alva looks like a choir girl but laughs with the sound of a marching band. “Huuh-eh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh!”
I’ve been told by some readers of Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series that they are surprised that we Trump accusers talk to each other like this. I think it is not how Trump accusers talk; I think it is how women talk. Which is to say that I offer Alva various animals and vegetables that Trump might smell like.
“No, no, no,” Alva replies. “I was holding my breath.”
“Are you the only Black woman Trump’s ever kissed?”
Alva Johnson, the former director of administrative operations for the Florida Trump campaign, regards me slyly through Zoom. She is a marvel, a Black woman from Alabama, a demure nonconformist, a former big-time college athlete, listed as 6 feet tall in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s sports pages (“I’m really 5 foot 9, but of course, as a hitter in volleyball, they fudge our heights for intimidation”), slim as a lettuce leaf, with a laugh amounting to genius.
“No, I’m not,” Alva says. “Trump dated a Black woman.”
“What?”
“You don’t know that?”
This summer, before I talk to Alva, I visit Jill Harth, the makeup artist. We are in Jill’s boudoir, and the two of us are going through her giant basket of Trump photos. While Jill is flinging out all over the bed smiling photos of our current president, the man she sued in 1997 for “groping her intimate private parts” (she later withdrew the suit), she tells me a strange story about her American Dream Calendar Girls, a witty beauty pageant she created in the mid-’90s. I am examining a photo of Trump with his arms around a group of Jill’s Calendar Girls, each one whiter than a boiled egg, when Jill mentions something about Trump constantly wanting to “help pick the girls.”
“He did not even want to look at photos of women of color,” she says.
I am not certain I heard her correctly. “What did Trump say exactly, Jill?”
“He said, ‘No! No! No! I don’t want to see any Black girls!’” (Trump has denied that he ever excluded Black women from such events.)
So, reader, when Alva Johnson says that Trump was head over heels for a Black woman, I need to prevent myself from sagging to my knees in astonishment. Yes, Alva assures me, “He dated a Black woman. Long term. For a couple of years.”
“No!” I cry.
“Listen, E. Jean,” Alva says, taking in breath, “if you really want to loosen up the racists from Trump’s base”—a tuba aria of chuckles—“if you want the white supremacists to understand that he is not their friend, I mean, he dog-whistles, but … he dated a Black woman.”
Even I, a chick so white that I look like I’ve been hit with a banana-cream pie, manage to “loosen up” the supremacists when a photo of Trump and me in the company of our ex-spouses shoots around the globe. My ex-husband is Black. The supremacists write emails to enlighten me as to the character of their godlike leader, who “would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man.” You understand, reader, that when the supremacists say Trump would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man, the supremacists do not say “touch,” nor “woman,” nor “been with,” nor “Black man.” I cannot give you the precise language—because their emails are not fit for human eyes—but I can tell you that they write such fascinating descriptions of my vagina that you might think you’re reading about a dead carp that has been left out in the sun and gone bad.
Actually, Alva tells me, Prince has a song about Trump’s relationship with a Black woman. “Yeah, it’s called ‘Trump,’ or ‘Trump’s Girlfriend,’ or something.”
The song is a hilarious tip of Prince’s hat to Trump titled “Donald Trump (Black Version),” though it’s not actually about Trump’s relationship with a Black woman, but a guy named Morris’s. Kara Young, the daughter of a Black mother and a white father, begins dating Trump around 1997, seven years after Prince writes the song; and thus it is that Alva, believing that “Trump can’t be racist,” what with the “hundred rap songs about him” and because, “well, he dated a Black woman,” and assuming that “Trump is never going to win”—thus it is, reader, that Ms. Alva Mahaffey, born into a large Birmingham family of Black professionals (her mother, Ammie Savage, is a teacher of French, Spanish, and English; her stepdad, Jacob Savage, is a microbiologist); thus it is that little Alva, who grows up listening to her grandmother and aunts talking about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed the four little girls, about the police siccing dogs on the protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, and about how they themselves brought food to Dr. King in the Birmingham jail; thus it is that Alva, a cheerleader, a member of the church choir, Alva, who eventually becomes a human-resources professional and founds her own event-planning company, Alva, who always votes Democrat, Alva, who hosts trainings for Obama-campaign volunteers in her home in 2008, Alva, who carries Hillary Clinton’s book Living History around with her; thus it is that Alva decides to join the campaign staff of Donald Trump.
Naturally, Trump looking her up and down like an Airedale eyeing a rump roast as she walks toward him at a 2015 campaign rally in Birmingham, and then exclaiming, “Oh! Beautiful! Beautiful! Fantastic!” nearly deters the ever-professional Alva from joining his campaign.
“But when I start working for him,” Alva says, “there are 17 other candidates in the race! There’s no way—no one expects Trump to become the Republican nominee. I mean, you have Ted Cruz. You have Marco Rubio. You have—”
“Jeb Bush,” I say, raising my head from my desk, where I have been rolling it back and forth in amazement at Alva’s awful miscalculation. Of course, she wasn’t the only one.
“I do it to get work experience on a political campaign. I do it to network. And I know I can throw a rally.”
Boy, does Alva know how to throw a rally! Two days before Super Tuesday, 32,000 people show up at her event in Madison, Alabama. Jeff Sessions becomes the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse Trump, bestowing a blessing of legitimacy upon the popinjay from New York.
Alva, who thinks she is just going to grow her event-planning business in Alabama, receives a phone call after the rally. “They ask me if I can pack my bags and go to Missouri,” says Alva, who has the title of director of outreach and coalitions. “It sounds like a good opportunity. There are still a lot of candidates in the race, and so I talk with my family, make sure my four kids are taken care of, and I go to Missouri. Then it’s just kind of traveling from state to state to state. I’m in a bubble. I’m out with the voters and supporters, or with people who are on the fence, or coming up with concepts, or rounding up people to go knock on doors. It’s a bunch of lonely people out in this world, okay? It’s a bunch of lonely people who want to feel heard, and they are vulnerable. Not the white supremacists. Not those people, but the vulnerable people who are put in that echo chamber, where bad information about Trump is ‘fake news’ and ‘can’t be true.’”
Alva is eventually promoted to director of operations for Florida, and runs the state’s three “mobile offices.” Showing the extraordinary stamina that seems to be required of campaign women, especially Black women—in this case, Alva doesn’t encounter a single other Black woman on the road trying to elect Trump—Alva commits herself to taking the three RVs to every county in Florida, which is how she arrives in Tampa with the Donald’s mug decorating her vehicle and his pudgy self heading toward her.
“What are you wearing, Alva?” I ask.
“A white T-shirt. With the word Trump in red and the blue logo: Make America Great Again. And I’ve got a pair of cute jeans, and heels. I always wear heels. Everyone always laughs, because I wear heels everywhere. So I am wearing burgundy-colored Nine West closed-toe pumps—I love those pumps—and my jeans are kind of tapered, but they, you know, are not tight or anything—”
Alva interrupts herself, and looks into the Zoom screen, arching her eyebrows in the manner of every woman in the world.
“It’s funny I have to say that. Because as women, we’re kind of conditioned to say, ‘I’m not showing this, I wasn’t showing that.’ So I am just wearing some blue jeans, my T-shirt, heels, and, as it is raining, a baseball cap.”
Prince has another song.
U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your
Kiss
“Trump walks into the RV,” Alva says. It is August 24, 2016. “And he’s like, ‘Wow! This is great!’ I’ve made sure we have volunteers and supporters there making him feel welcome, and I’m in the back making certain that people get to meet him—‘Okay, did you get his autograph? Good! Come around this way!’ So I’m directing traffic, and I can see him looking at me. I’m at work. I am in front of people I manage and who have to listen to what I tell them to do. They must take me seriously as a woman. And it’s even more complicated because I’m a Black woman. I don’t want any blurred lines. I don’t want any questions about my professionalism.”
Trump is about to exit when he pauses in front of Alva.
“He grabs me and holds my arms at my sides. People don’t seem to register that this is what is happening to me. I’m as stiff as a board. And he kisses me. He tries to kiss me on the lips, but I turn my head.
“I’m at work! He’s my boss! There are other women there. He doesn’t do this to anyone but me. I don’t show emotion. I just, you know, I just keep trekking through. The story ‘Alva got a kiss from the boss’ travels so fast, it beats me to Sarasota. And I remember when I call my parents that night and tell them what happens, I start crying. I remember pulling over in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and crying. They say, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I laugh and say, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying.’ Then I feel stupid for crying. But it is something that triggers me when I’m telling the story. And it is something I feel even to this day: I know that what happened is not right. It’s without my permission.”
Alva cries on the phone because long ago, when she was in fourth grade, after her little sister, Aundria Mahaffey, died of leukemia, Alva’s mother—who is divorced from Alva’s dad, grieving her child, and trying to make ends meet on a teacher’s salary—turns to a teenage friend of the family to babysit Alva. Alva’s mom is always careful. She believes she is putting her daughter in the safest and most nurturing place. “I am 9 years old,” Alva says, “and the guy is a jock who chases me around for hours while I hide, cry, and try to fight him off when he finds me. I squeeze under the bed, and he pulls me out by my legs. Even when he goes away to college, he’ll pick me up as a ‘big brother’ and will literally park his car and rape me as I try to fight him off. I am 11 when he goes off to school. This continues until I am 13, and he is a junior in college and finally has a steady girlfriend.” (He denies Alva’s allegations.)
“When we are both adults, he sends me a friend request on Facebook. But I am grown up now. I’m a woman and I’m no longer hiding. I sent him a private message on Facebook about what he did to me. You know what he replies? He replies with a sad-face emoji.”
“Take the weekend off! Rejuvenate! Get rested! And Monday, we’re all going to come back, and it’s going to be a brand-new day!”
The Florida campaign director is delivering this pep talk to the state’s Trump-for-president staff during a dinner meeting at a seafood restaurant in Sarasota. Alva is thinking, We’re four weeks away from the election, and you want us to rest? She elbows the guy next to her—what’s going on?
And he is like, You know, the thing today.
And Alva is like, What thing today?
And he says, Well, there’s, you know, the video.
And Alva is like, What video?
So she Googles it, and it’s this Access Hollywood tape, and she can’t hear it, but she is looking at the words running underneath, “I just start kissing them … I don’t even wait . . . When you’re a star, they let you do it,” and Alva pushes back her chair, stands up, drops her napkin on the table, and tells her partner, who is visiting from Alabama (and who is not a fan of Trump’s), that they are leaving. “Good, I’m ready to leave anyway,” he replies, and the two of them walk out, get in their rental car, and close the door. At which point Alva restarts the video and starts to scream: “That’s what Trump did to me! I knew it! I knew it! I knew I wasn’t overreacting!”
She never goes back. She consults with a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, Adam Horowitz, quits the campaign on his advice; and, figuring why throw the baby out with the bathwater, later submits applications for several positions with the new administration. “I earned this opportunity through my hard work on the campaign,” Alva says. “Why should I be punished for his actions?” In 2017 she hires Hassan Zavareei, a respected Washington, D.C., litigator; and, viewing the case as a former HR professional who would “persuade any company she worked for to get rid of a man like Trump because of his pattern of allegations,” sues Trump in February 2019 for kissing her without her consent and for paying her less than her white male counterparts.
In June 2019, William F. Jung, a Trump-appointed federal judge, dismisses the case, on the grounds that it was improperly framed as a political statement, though he says Alva can refile in a streamlined suit alleging “simple battery” for the kiss and wage discrimination. About a month later, Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder submits the video of the “interaction.” Alva remembers turning her head to avoid Trump’s lips, and Trump holding her more forcibly than the video shows; Zavareei submits to the court an independent forensic report concluding that the video might have been doctored, and asks to reopen discovery to obtain the original. The judge denies the motion, and Alva drops the suit in September 2019.
Alva’s rakish earrings swing back and forth.
“Well?” I say, sucking on the end of my Sharpie.
“Well,” Alva says, with her sideways smile. “It’s embarrassing being a Black woman who worked for Trump, I can tell you that much!
“That’s the big one for me,” she says. “I disappointed a lot of people. Not just Black people, but Black and white. But specifically Black people. I expected people to give me the Heisman arm.” She laughs and throws out her arm. “It’s like that stiff-arm from the Heisman Trophy.”
The Trump campaign is suing Alva for violating the nondisclosure agreement that she signed as a condition for working for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. For good measure, the campaign’s lawyers are also asking that Alva pay its legal fees (yet to be determined). Which is rich, considering that on the deadline for Trump to appeal the state court’s ruling requiring him to participate in discovery in my own lawsuit, the White House arranges for Attorney General Bill Barr and the 113,000-member Department of Justice to defend him, thereby making Alva pay for his defense in my suit with her tax dollars (and yours too, reader).
But Trump can’t do much to Alva. She doesn’t have any money, she tells me. She is busy writing, networking, and waiting for the end of “the nightmare that is this presidency,” but alas, there’s nothing for old Trump to sue for, beg for, or con her out of.
“So, Alva,” I say, after we both pour ourselves a cocktail. “If you could go back in time, what do you wish had happened when Trump came waddling up to you in that RV?”
“My instinct?” Alva says, sipping her dry rosé on ice. “I’d like to punch him. I mean, I’m pretty strong. He’s 6 foot 3 or something, but I probably would be more aggressive. I would probably push him off me. I would put my finger in his face and tell him, ‘Don’t you ever put your hands on me.’ I probably would tell him that he’s a future eunuch if he makes one more move.”
“You’re Division I, woman!” I cry, growing more buoyant by the second.
“As a kid I had to fight a dude off of me, so I always know it’s easier for me to get on top than to be pinned down.”
“And what if Trump comes at you again?”
“I would probably knee him,” Alva says.
Behind her on the pale butter-yellow wall is a deer’s head with a 14-point rack of antlers, a buck, mounted above the fireplace.
“And what would Trump do next?” I ask.
Alva rocks back, closes her eyes, and out comes the whole brass section of laughter.
“I’m afraid that Trump would like it.”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
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And Then Donald Trump Walked Into the RV
E. Jean Carroll
18-23 minutes
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Carroll’s lawsuit took a dramatic turn two weeks ago, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the president’s defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated and rejected by the American people.” Read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here.
Stills from the 2016 video of Alva and Donald Trump (Courtesy of Alva Johnson)
You are looking at slightly out-of-focus 2016 images taken from a 15-second video of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and a campaign staffer, Alva Johnson. Before people see the tape, Trump attorneys say that their client does not kiss Alva. After the tape is released, the lawyers say that what Trump is doing to Alva is an “interaction,” a word they will employ in pleadings before the judge presiding over the federal suit in which Alva claims that Trump “kisses her without her consent.”
Reader, we will now leave the video so we can learn who kisses whom, who sues whom, and why this kind of fight with a man is not new for Alva.
Nydia Blas
“What does Trump smell like?”
“I don’t know.”
“When he comes in at you.”
“I—I—”
“Stop and think.”
“I don’t—”
Alva lowers her eyes and tries to smell Trump in her mind’s nostril. “Sweat—maybe?” Alva’s nose ring quivers like a damselfly. “Makeup? Cosmetics? It’s a cramped RV and it’s raining, and people are wet, and there are a bunch of guys who’ve been there since 6 o’clock in the morning setting up chairs and tables and so I—really—just—freeze.”
Alva looks like a choir girl but laughs with the sound of a marching band. “Huuh-eh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh!”
I’ve been told by some readers of Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series that they are surprised that we Trump accusers talk to each other like this. I think it is not how Trump accusers talk; I think it is how women talk. Which is to say that I offer Alva various animals and vegetables that Trump might smell like.
“No, no, no,” Alva replies. “I was holding my breath.”
“Are you the only Black woman Trump’s ever kissed?”
Alva Johnson, the former director of administrative operations for the Florida Trump campaign, regards me slyly through Zoom. She is a marvel, a Black woman from Alabama, a demure nonconformist, a former big-time college athlete, listed as 6 feet tall in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s sports pages (“I’m really 5 foot 9, but of course, as a hitter in volleyball, they fudge our heights for intimidation”), slim as a lettuce leaf, with a laugh amounting to genius.
“No, I’m not,” Alva says. “Trump dated a Black woman.”
“What?”
“You don’t know that?”
This summer, before I talk to Alva, I visit Jill Harth, the makeup artist. We are in Jill’s boudoir, and the two of us are going through her giant basket of Trump photos. While Jill is flinging out all over the bed smiling photos of our current president, the man she sued in 1997 for “groping her intimate private parts” (she later withdrew the suit), she tells me a strange story about her American Dream Calendar Girls, a witty beauty pageant she created in the mid-’90s. I am examining a photo of Trump with his arms around a group of Jill’s Calendar Girls, each one whiter than a boiled egg, when Jill mentions something about Trump constantly wanting to “help pick the girls.”
“He did not even want to look at photos of women of color,” she says.
I am not certain I heard her correctly. “What did Trump say exactly, Jill?”
“He said, ‘No! No! No! I don’t want to see any Black girls!’” (Trump has denied that he ever excluded Black women from such events.)
So, reader, when Alva Johnson says that Trump was head over heels for a Black woman, I need to prevent myself from sagging to my knees in astonishment. Yes, Alva assures me, “He dated a Black woman. Long term. For a couple of years.”
“No!” I cry.
“Listen, E. Jean,” Alva says, taking in breath, “if you really want to loosen up the racists from Trump’s base”—a tuba aria of chuckles—“if you want the white supremacists to understand that he is not their friend, I mean, he dog-whistles, but … he dated a Black woman.”
Even I, a chick so white that I look like I’ve been hit with a banana-cream pie, manage to “loosen up” the supremacists when a photo of Trump and me in the company of our ex-spouses shoots around the globe. My ex-husband is Black. The supremacists write emails to enlighten me as to the character of their godlike leader, who “would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man.” You understand, reader, that when the supremacists say Trump would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man, the supremacists do not say “touch,” nor “woman,” nor “been with,” nor “Black man.” I cannot give you the precise language—because their emails are not fit for human eyes—but I can tell you that they write such fascinating descriptions of my vagina that you might think you’re reading about a dead carp that has been left out in the sun and gone bad.
Actually, Alva tells me, Prince has a song about Trump’s relationship with a Black woman. “Yeah, it’s called ‘Trump,’ or ‘Trump’s Girlfriend,’ or something.”
The song is a hilarious tip of Prince’s hat to Trump titled “Donald Trump (Black Version),” though it’s not actually about Trump’s relationship with a Black woman, but a guy named Morris’s. Kara Young, the daughter of a Black mother and a white father, begins dating Trump around 1997, seven years after Prince writes the song; and thus it is that Alva, believing that “Trump can’t be racist,” what with the “hundred rap songs about him” and because, “well, he dated a Black woman,” and assuming that “Trump is never going to win”—thus it is, reader, that Ms. Alva Mahaffey, born into a large Birmingham family of Black professionals (her mother, Ammie Savage, is a teacher of French, Spanish, and English; her stepdad, Jacob Savage, is a microbiologist); thus it is that little Alva, who grows up listening to her grandmother and aunts talking about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed the four little girls, about the police siccing dogs on the protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, and about how they themselves brought food to Dr. King in the Birmingham jail; thus it is that Alva, a cheerleader, a member of the church choir, Alva, who eventually becomes a human-resources professional and founds her own event-planning company, Alva, who always votes Democrat, Alva, who hosts trainings for Obama-campaign volunteers in her home in 2008, Alva, who carries Hillary Clinton’s book Living History around with her; thus it is that Alva decides to join the campaign staff of Donald Trump.
Naturally, Trump looking her up and down like an Airedale eyeing a rump roast as she walks toward him at a 2015 campaign rally in Birmingham, and then exclaiming, “Oh! Beautiful! Beautiful! Fantastic!” nearly deters the ever-professional Alva from joining his campaign.
“But when I start working for him,” Alva says, “there are 17 other candidates in the race! There’s no way—no one expects Trump to become the Republican nominee. I mean, you have Ted Cruz. You have Marco Rubio. You have—”
“Jeb Bush,” I say, raising my head from my desk, where I have been rolling it back and forth in amazement at Alva’s awful miscalculation. Of course, she wasn’t the only one.
“I do it to get work experience on a political campaign. I do it to network. And I know I can throw a rally.”
Boy, does Alva know how to throw a rally! Two days before Super Tuesday, 32,000 people show up at her event in Madison, Alabama. Jeff Sessions becomes the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse Trump, bestowing a blessing of legitimacy upon the popinjay from New York.
Alva, who thinks she is just going to grow her event-planning business in Alabama, receives a phone call after the rally. “They ask me if I can pack my bags and go to Missouri,” says Alva, who has the title of director of outreach and coalitions. “It sounds like a good opportunity. There are still a lot of candidates in the race, and so I talk with my family, make sure my four kids are taken care of, and I go to Missouri. Then it’s just kind of traveling from state to state to state. I’m in a bubble. I’m out with the voters and supporters, or with people who are on the fence, or coming up with concepts, or rounding up people to go knock on doors. It’s a bunch of lonely people out in this world, okay? It’s a bunch of lonely people who want to feel heard, and they are vulnerable. Not the white supremacists. Not those people, but the vulnerable people who are put in that echo chamber, where bad information about Trump is ‘fake news’ and ‘can’t be true.’”
Alva is eventually promoted to director of operations for Florida, and runs the state’s three “mobile offices.” Showing the extraordinary stamina that seems to be required of campaign women, especially Black women—in this case, Alva doesn’t encounter a single other Black woman on the road trying to elect Trump—Alva commits herself to taking the three RVs to every county in Florida, which is how she arrives in Tampa with the Donald’s mug decorating her vehicle and his pudgy self heading toward her.
“What are you wearing, Alva?” I ask.
“A white T-shirt. With the word Trump in red and the blue logo: Make America Great Again. And I’ve got a pair of cute jeans, and heels. I always wear heels. Everyone always laughs, because I wear heels everywhere. So I am wearing burgundy-colored Nine West closed-toe pumps—I love those pumps—and my jeans are kind of tapered, but they, you know, are not tight or anything—”
Alva interrupts herself, and looks into the Zoom screen, arching her eyebrows in the manner of every woman in the world.
“It’s funny I have to say that. Because as women, we’re kind of conditioned to say, ‘I’m not showing this, I wasn’t showing that.’ So I am just wearing some blue jeans, my T-shirt, heels, and, as it is raining, a baseball cap.”
Prince has another song.
U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your
Kiss
“Trump walks into the RV,” Alva says. It is August 24, 2016. “And he’s like, ‘Wow! This is great!’ I’ve made sure we have volunteers and supporters there making him feel welcome, and I’m in the back making certain that people get to meet him—‘Okay, did you get his autograph? Good! Come around this way!’ So I’m directing traffic, and I can see him looking at me. I’m at work. I am in front of people I manage and who have to listen to what I tell them to do. They must take me seriously as a woman. And it’s even more complicated because I’m a Black woman. I don’t want any blurred lines. I don’t want any questions about my professionalism.”
Trump is about to exit when he pauses in front of Alva.
“He grabs me and holds my arms at my sides. People don’t seem to register that this is what is happening to me. I’m as stiff as a board. And he kisses me. He tries to kiss me on the lips, but I turn my head.
“I’m at work! He’s my boss! There are other women there. He doesn’t do this to anyone but me. I don’t show emotion. I just, you know, I just keep trekking through. The story ‘Alva got a kiss from the boss’ travels so fast, it beats me to Sarasota. And I remember when I call my parents that night and tell them what happens, I start crying. I remember pulling over in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and crying. They say, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I laugh and say, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying.’ Then I feel stupid for crying. But it is something that triggers me when I’m telling the story. And it is something I feel even to this day: I know that what happened is not right. It’s without my permission.”
Alva cries on the phone because long ago, when she was in fourth grade, after her little sister, Aundria Mahaffey, died of leukemia, Alva’s mother—who is divorced from Alva’s dad, grieving her child, and trying to make ends meet on a teacher’s salary—turns to a teenage friend of the family to babysit Alva. Alva’s mom is always careful. She believes she is putting her daughter in the safest and most nurturing place. “I am 9 years old,” Alva says, “and the guy is a jock who chases me around for hours while I hide, cry, and try to fight him off when he finds me. I squeeze under the bed, and he pulls me out by my legs. Even when he goes away to college, he’ll pick me up as a ‘big brother’ and will literally park his car and rape me as I try to fight him off. I am 11 when he goes off to school. This continues until I am 13, and he is a junior in college and finally has a steady girlfriend.” (He denies Alva’s allegations.)
“When we are both adults, he sends me a friend request on Facebook. But I am grown up now. I’m a woman and I’m no longer hiding. I sent him a private message on Facebook about what he did to me. You know what he replies? He replies with a sad-face emoji.”
“Take the weekend off! Rejuvenate! Get rested! And Monday, we’re all going to come back, and it’s going to be a brand-new day!”
The Florida campaign director is delivering this pep talk to the state’s Trump-for-president staff during a dinner meeting at a seafood restaurant in Sarasota. Alva is thinking, We’re four weeks away from the election, and you want us to rest? She elbows the guy next to her—what’s going on?
And he is like, You know, the thing today.
And Alva is like, What thing today?
And he says, Well, there’s, you know, the video.
And Alva is like, What video?
So she Googles it, and it’s this Access Hollywood tape, and she can’t hear it, but she is looking at the words running underneath, “I just start kissing them … I don’t even wait . . . When you’re a star, they let you do it,” and Alva pushes back her chair, stands up, drops her napkin on the table, and tells her partner, who is visiting from Alabama (and who is not a fan of Trump’s), that they are leaving. “Good, I’m ready to leave anyway,” he replies, and the two of them walk out, get in their rental car, and close the door. At which point Alva restarts the video and starts to scream: “That’s what Trump did to me! I knew it! I knew it! I knew I wasn’t overreacting!”
She never goes back. She consults with a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, Adam Horowitz, quits the campaign on his advice; and, figuring why throw the baby out with the bathwater, later submits applications for several positions with the new administration. “I earned this opportunity through my hard work on the campaign,” Alva says. “Why should I be punished for his actions?” In 2017 she hires Hassan Zavareei, a respected Washington, D.C., litigator; and, viewing the case as a former HR professional who would “persuade any company she worked for to get rid of a man like Trump because of his pattern of allegations,” sues Trump in February 2019 for kissing her without her consent and for paying her less than her white male counterparts.
In June 2019, William F. Jung, a Trump-appointed federal judge, dismisses the case, on the grounds that it was improperly framed as a political statement, though he says Alva can refile in a streamlined suit alleging “simple battery” for the kiss and wage discrimination. About a month later, Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder submits the video of the “interaction.” Alva remembers turning her head to avoid Trump’s lips, and Trump holding her more forcibly than the video shows; Zavareei submits to the court an independent forensic report concluding that the video might have been doctored, and asks to reopen discovery to obtain the original. The judge denies the motion, and Alva drops the suit in September 2019.
Alva’s rakish earrings swing back and forth.
“Well?” I say, sucking on the end of my Sharpie.
“Well,” Alva says, with her sideways smile. “It’s embarrassing being a Black woman who worked for Trump, I can tell you that much!
“That’s the big one for me,” she says. “I disappointed a lot of people. Not just Black people, but Black and white. But specifically Black people. I expected people to give me the Heisman arm.” She laughs and throws out her arm. “It’s like that stiff-arm from the Heisman Trophy.”
The Trump campaign is suing Alva for violating the nondisclosure agreement that she signed as a condition for working for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. For good measure, the campaign’s lawyers are also asking that Alva pay its legal fees (yet to be determined). Which is rich, considering that on the deadline for Trump to appeal the state court’s ruling requiring him to participate in discovery in my own lawsuit, the White House arranges for Attorney General Bill Barr and the 113,000-member Department of Justice to defend him, thereby making Alva pay for his defense in my suit with her tax dollars (and yours too, reader).
But Trump can’t do much to Alva. She doesn’t have any money, she tells me. She is busy writing, networking, and waiting for the end of “the nightmare that is this presidency,” but alas, there’s nothing for old Trump to sue for, beg for, or con her out of.
“So, Alva,” I say, after we both pour ourselves a cocktail. “If you could go back in time, what do you wish had happened when Trump came waddling up to you in that RV?”
“My instinct?” Alva says, sipping her dry rosé on ice. “I’d like to punch him. I mean, I’m pretty strong. He’s 6 foot 3 or something, but I probably would be more aggressive. I would probably push him off me. I would put my finger in his face and tell him, ‘Don’t you ever put your hands on me.’ I probably would tell him that he’s a future eunuch if he makes one more move.”
“You’re Division I, woman!” I cry, growing more buoyant by the second.
“As a kid I had to fight a dude off of me, so I always know it’s easier for me to get on top than to be pinned down.”
“And what if Trump comes at you again?”
“I would probably knee him,” Alva says.
Behind her on the pale butter-yellow wall is a deer’s head with a 14-point rack of antlers, a buck, mounted above the fireplace.
“And what would Trump do next?” I ask.
Alva rocks back, closes her eyes, and out comes the whole brass section of laughter.
“I’m afraid that Trump would like it.”
E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and former advice columnist for Elle magazine.
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