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#MeToo’ism and the age of sexual victimization.

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Offline Athos_131

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Reply #480 on: June 04, 2019, 08:18:14 PM
Ellen DeGeneres says she was sexually abused as a teen. Her mother regrets not believing her.

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Ellen DeGeneres’s mother says she regrets not believing her daughter when she said she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a teenager.

It’s the first time 89-year-old Betty DeGeneres has spoken publicly about the abuse. In a statement to NBC News, she responded to the talk show host’s revelation of details of the abuse in an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix Show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction." In the episode released Friday, DeGeneres said her mother didn’t believe her story.

“I know now that one of the hardest things to do is speak up after being sexually abused," Betty DeGeneres said in a statement. “I love my daughter, and I wish I had the capacity to listen to her when she told me what happened. I live with that regret, and I wouldn’t want that for any other parent. If someone in your life has the courage to speak out, please believe them."

Ellen DeGeneres told Letterman the abuse began when she was 15 or 16, after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy.

“He told me when she was out of town that he’d felt a lump in her breast and needed to feel my breasts," she said in the episode. “He convinced me that he needs to feel my breasts, and then he tries to do it again another time, and then another time. … When I didn’t let him the next time, he just kept taunting me and pretending like he was coming at me all the time."

DeGeneres, 61, said she struggled to tell her mother “because I was protecting her, and I knew that that would ruin her happiness. She was happy with him, even though he was a horrible man.”

She eventually told her. “And then she didn’t believe me. And then she stayed with him for 18 more years. ... He said I was lying, and then she stayed with him."

The talk show host said her mother’s reaction has been a source of tension in their relationship. “I didn’t really let it get to me. And, until recently, it’s like, you know, I kind of went, ‘I wish I would have been better taken care of. I wish she would have believed me.’ And she’s apologetic, but you know.”

DeGeneres had previously spoken about the sexual abuse in a 2005 interview with Allure Magazine, as well as during an October 2018 episode of her own talk show while speaking with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.

“I was 15 years old — I’m not even going into the details, it doesn’t matter — but, you know, we are really vulnerable at that age, and we trust,” she told Guthrie at the time. “And then when you are violated, you don’t know what to do and you don’t want to say anything, because first of all, you just start wondering, ‘How did this happen? How was I that stupid?’ All of these things you think you could have controlled, and you can’t.”

She told Letterman she thought it was important to speak out about her experience.

“When I see people speaking out, especially now, it angers me when victims aren’t believed, because we just don’t make stuff up," she said. “There are so many men that get away with so much. It is just time for us to have a voice. It’s time for us to have power.”

#Resist

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Offline watcher1

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Legal fees for cases relating to masturbating detainees at Cook County Jail could reach more than $2 million.

The Cook County Board’s Finance Committee on Wednesday will consider the latest $486,216.39 in fees and expenses for five cases brought by public defenders, sheriff’s officers and other female county employees exposed to the harassment. That comes on top of nearly $1.7 million the Board has already paid out.

It’s been dubbed an “extreme brand of workplace sexual harassment” by one state senator who sought increased penalties for the lewd behavior. The women subjected to it have written letters to county officials and filed lawsuits.

The problem got so bad a federal judge in 2017 ordered all Cook County jail detainees with a history of indecent exposure, masturbation or sexual misconduct to remain handcuffed “at all times” during courthouse visits.

That year, half a dozen employees of the Cook County Public Defender’s office filed a sexual harassment suit, saying the problem dated back to 2015. In the suit, they described frequent encounters with detainees who would masturbate, sexually harass or expose themselves to lawyers during meetings.

In addition, dozens of female sheriff’s officers filed suit against Sheriff Tom Dart in 2017 and last year, alleging that he hadn’t done enough to protect them from near daily encounters with detainees who would sexually harass and assault them.

The fees coming before the committee on Wednesday relate to five of the cases, brought by public defenders, jail guards, a court interpreter and a nurse.

Commissioner Peter Silvestri, R-Elmwood Park, said the situation was sad for the victims and taxpayers.

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psiberzerker

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Jesus.  You want to get off?  Then try not to distract the lawyer that's trying to get you off.

I guess if they had any self control, they wouldn't be in jail.  It's hard enough for women to get into the business to begin with.



Offline Athos_131

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Reply #483 on: June 07, 2019, 12:37:57 AM
U.S. IN TOP 10 MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRIES FOR WOMEN, REPORT FINDS

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The U.S. has been ranked in the top 10 most dangerous countries for women, making it the only Western nation to be named among the world's worst guarantors of female rights and safety.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation surveyed 500 experts to determine where women were most at risk. Countries were ranked in six key areas: health care, sexual violence, nonsexual violence, cultural practices, discrimination and human trafficking.

Nine of the top 10 nations were in Asia, the Middle East or Africa. The only Western nation included was the U.S., which the foundation said was directly related to the #MeToo movement that rocked American society in the wake of rape and sexual harassment allegations against high-profile figures in 2017.

America was ranked third with Syria in terms of danger of sexual violence, including rape, sexual harassment, coercion into sex and the lack of access to justice in rape cases. The next worst, in the opinion of those surveyed, was the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For nonsexual violence—including conflict-related violence and forms of domestic physical and mental abuse—the U.S. was ranked sixth. Syria, now in its seventh year of a catastrophic civil war, was ranked third overall.

America did not rank in the top 10 worst countries for human trafficking, health care, discrimination or dangers associated with cultural traditions. Its low performance for sexual and nonsexual violence, however, was enough to get it into the top 10 worst offenders.

India took the top spot. It was the worst performing in three categories: the risk of sexual violence and harassment, the danger of traditional cultural practices and the threat of becoming a victim of human trafficking, sexual slavery and domestic servitude. The report cited acid attacks, female genital mutilation, child marriage and physical abuse as some of the most notable dangers facing Indian women.

The foundation published a similar survey in 2011, which chose the top five most dangerous nations for women. All five were featured in the 2018 report. India was named first in terms of danger this year, Afghanistan second, Somalia fourth, Pakistan sixth and Democratic Republic of Congo seventh. Along with the U.S. and Syria, the list was completed by Yemen in eighth and Nigeria in ninth place.

“World leaders vowed three years ago to eliminate all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls by 2030, allowing them to live freely and safely, to participate equally in political, economic and public life,” the foundation said. “But despite this pledge it is estimated that one in three women globally experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime.”

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Reply #484 on: June 08, 2019, 03:21:52 PM


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The first thing Kate Pierson did after unlocking the yoga studio that November afternoon was set the mood, plugging in the soothing waterfall, selecting a cheery lemongrass oil for the scent diffuser. The thermostat was turned up to 98 for the 5:30 class.

Hot Yoga Tallahassee was styled as a calming haven for a mostly female clientele. The men who practiced there, Pierson said, were men at ease with the “light and love” mission of the place.

But the man who walked in about 5:15 that Friday was different. Pierson was still alone in the lobby when he entered, a big guy whose maroon Florida State University T-shirt was stretched over a paunchy belly, the wrapper still on the yoga mat under his arm. A black Planet Fitness bag was strapped across his chest. Inside, she would learn soon, was a Glock 9mm pistol.

The man wasn’t on the list of 11 students preregistered for the evening class, and he seemed disappointed so few were expected. Handing over a debit card for the $12 walk-in fee, he identified himself as “Scott . . . Paul,” hesitating between the two words.

His name was actually Scott Paul Beierle, a 40-year-old former FSU graduate student who had driven 250 miles for a yoga class in the town where he had twice been arrested for groping female students and banned from campus.

Beierle was an avowed hater of women, a man who repeatedly grabbed women in real life and fantasized about raping and killing them in the horrific collection of lyrics, poetry and novels he began writing as a teenager. His interactions with the opposite sex had gotten him fired from teaching jobs, booted from the Army and hauled before the principal of his high school. He traced his fury at women — “Just beneath their blushing lashes and their innocent smiles lies the most rancid and putrid, sickening essences” — to the girls who both aroused and frustrated him in eighth grade.

It is a kind of hatred that experts in extremism warn is becoming more common and more dangerous, providing what amounts to a new feeder network for white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups.

“More and more, we see misogyny as the gateway drug for extremists,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of more than 20 people interviewed to compile this account of Beierle’s history and the phenomenon it represents.

On that pleasant fall night in 2018, Beierle seemed uncertain at first, Pierson recalled. He paced the second-floor breezeway of the palm-lined shopping center as a few women began arriving in their yoga outfits. Once he came in to ask when the more crowded sessions were held — Saturday mornings were popular, Pierson told him — and then walked back out. “I thought he was skipping it after all,” she said.

The yoga class had already begun when Beierle finally entered the studio. The students were in “child’s pose” at the time, on their knees, noses to the floor, arms outstretched.

He was still wearing his street shoes, carrying the shrink-wrapped mat and bag. The teacher told him to store his stuff in a cubby outside the hot room.

“But I have a question,” he said, fumbling in his bag. He took out a set of earmuff hearing protectors and put them on. Then he pulled out the Glock.

For a moment he stood still, displaying the gun, according to one of the students who looked up to see him. A big man in a power pose of his own.

Then he pointed it at the woman closest to him.

In 2018, a few months before Beierle stood in that studio, the Southern Poverty Law Center added a new category to its tracking list of hate movements around the country: male supremacy.

The term encompasses a worrying new array of assaults by men who view women as genetically inferior, inherently treacherous or unwilling to provide them with the sex and submission they see as their birthright.

It’s a trend with roots both ancient and new. Condemning women as a gender dates to at least the ancient Greek myth that blamed Pandora for unleashing evil into the world. But in the digital age, misogyny is being stoked within hundreds of online chat rooms and forums, echo chambers of grievance that drive some men to cyberbullying and a far smaller number to violence.

“What’s different today is the online space itself,” Beirich said. “Back in the day, an ad on how to meet girls in the back of a magazine didn’t open a door into the dark web.”

In a 2018 report, the Anti-Defamation League divided this “manosphere” into three overlapping tribes: “men’s rights activists,” who have channeled legitimate advocacy for equal treatment in divorce and custody disputes into a toxic male rage; “pick-up artists,” who have perverted those back-of-the-magazine schemes into a cult of predatory sexual entitlement; and “incels,” men who blame all women for their own involuntary celibacy.

All three groups espouse a generalized loathing for women and the shifting norms — from female empowerment to gay rights — that they blame for their many miseries. As the online communities swelled in the past five or six years, the rhetoric became more extreme.

“It went from ‘I got [screwed] in my divorce settlement’ to ‘Women are dogs, women should be raped,’ ” Beirich said.

The FBI began tracking hate crimes against women in 2013, though the agency’s statistics have long been plagued by major inconsistencies in the ways thousands of police departments around the country define and report hate crimes. In 2017, the most recent year available, the FBI tallied 24 attacks against women based on their gender — a tiny percentage of hate crimes overall.

But researchers say many incidents go unreported by police or by women themselves, and they expect more attacks in the future, spurred by the cross-pollination among aggrieved men and broader hate movements.

“A deep-seated loathing of women acts as a connective tissue between many white supremacists,” explained the ADL report, titled “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy.”

While old-guard white supremacists revered women as the mothers of the race, younger bigots despise them as just one more group responsible for eroding their status.

“Even if you become the ultimate alpha male, some stupid bitch will still ruin your life,” declared Andrew Anglin on the neo-Nazi website he founded, the Daily Stormer. Anglin has credited his site’s anti-women content with bolstering traffic even as other hate sites have seen a falloff.

“Incels are full of rage, and it is trivial to turn these guys into kike haters,” explained one of Anglin’s sidekicks, Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev, in a Daily Stormer post. “Few people have ever personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally observable sense), but every single breathing man has had it f----- up by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own mothers).”

The ugly rhetoric can lead to violence. The 19-year-old nursing student alleged to have opened fire in a San Diego-area synagogue in April cited, among a litany of anti-Semitic conspiracies, the role of Jews in promoting feminism.

Incel adherents in particular — who dream of destroying the women they long for, derisively nicknamed “Stacys,” and the attractive men, “Chads,” who have better luck — have emerged as killers.

In a 2014 rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., a 22-year-old college dropout named Elliot Rodger used guns, a knife and his car to kill six and injure 13 before shooting himself, blaming the attack on his inability to get a girlfriend and his disgust at interracial couples. A year later, a 26-year-old student shot his English professor and eight classmates at an Oregon community college, having lamented in a virulently racist manifesto that he was a virgin with no girlfriend. In 2018, a driver plowed a rented van down a Toronto sidewalk, killing 10, after allegedly posting on Facebook that the “incel Rebellion has already begun!”

The last two cited the example of Rodger before they killed. And in a video posted well before driving to Tallahassee in November and giving his debit card to Kate Pierson, so had Scott Beierle.

Pierson was still sitting at the front desk during the 5:30 class when she was startled by three sharp blows on the wall behind her. She thought perhaps the stereo had fallen from its shelf in the studio. But then she heard the muffled voice of the teacher — “What are you doing?” — followed by five quick gunshots.

Pierson dropped her phone and ran out the front door, turning left to avoid passing the broad window of the studio. She heard screaming behind and saw one of the students running toward her. “I think I’ve been shot,” the woman cried.

Inside the studio, it was pandemonium. Beierle fired wildly and fast, not seeming to target any one student so much as all of them. In the panicked scramble, one woman was hit in her left arm, torso and leg, police said. Another was shot in her chest, another in her thigh. A woman was grazed in the back as she sprinted out the door. One student cowered beneath her foam yoga mat as shell casings showered the carpet.

Two women close to the shooter fell almost immediately, one struck in the back of the head, the other twice in the back. Maura Binkley was a 21-year-old German major in her senior year at FSU who had recently joined a rally against gun violence at the state capital. Nancy Van Vessem was a Tallahassee physician, health-care executive and a near-daily regular at the studio. Neither would survive.

After 13 shots, the shooter paused. Joshua Quick, a second-year FSU law student and the only male in the class, heard the gun click.

“I didn’t know if it was jammed or what,” said Quick, who’d worked as a nurse in Arizona before enrolling in law school. A slender yoga and meditation enthusiast, Quick, now 34, said he thought: “I’m just going to hit him. He’ll cock that thing back and shoot me. But I’m going to hit him.”

With his terrified girlfriend looking on, Quick grabbed the best weapon in reach: an upright vacuum cleaner in the corner. And he rushed at Beierle.

In the late 1990s, when Scott Beierle was in high school in Vestal, N.Y., he wrote a novel. He called it "Rejected Youth," a 70,000-word revenge fantasy of a middle school boy nursing hatred of the girls who had shunned and humiliated him. The protagonist, Scott Bradley, critiques their looks, ridicules their boyfriends and is enraged by their disdain. "The hot ones all detest me, and I haven't a clue why," he laments.

The boy murders them, brutally, one by one, even as he admires their bodies. In the final scene, he cuts the throat of the clique’s ringleader before he throws himself off a roof with the cops closing in.

According to someone who knew Beierle back then and provided a copy of the manuscript, the characters, with names slightly changed, were their real classmates.

“This is basically his school journal,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being associated with the killer.

Beierle was one of three boys raised in a middle-class family in Vestal, a small suburb of Binghamton. His father was a white-collar office worker, and Beierle earned badges as a Boy Scout, worked as a paperboy, served as an acolyte in his Methodist church and was elected vice president of the Vestal High Class of 1997. But he also openly admired Hitler and the Aryan Nations. His class campaign slogan, against a female opponent, was “Vote Beierle, because we don’t need no woman.”

After high school, he went out west for a few months, telling friends he was trying to make it as a screenwriter. But he returned to New York, graduating from Binghamton University and burning through local hangouts and odd jobs: banned from a downtown bar for groping women, according to the childhood friend, and fired from a call-center job for harassing a female co-worker.

Beierle wrote of discovering punk rock around this time, reveling in the “utter chaos” of the sound, and used the incident with his co-worker as inspiration for one of his first songs: “Stalker.”

His violent writings were already a concern to his family. One sister-in-law told Tallahassee detectives that Beierle’s parents slept with their bedroom door locked when he was in the house. She and her husband, Beierle’s brother, considered contacting law enforcement in 2002 out of fear that Beierle might be the D.C. sniper, who was then terrorizing the Washington area near where Beierle had moved after college. None of Beierle’s relatives responded to requests for comment.

By 2005, Beierle was living in Maryland and teaching English and social studies at Anne Arundel County’s Meade High School. Toward the end of his first year, he was investigated by police for making a female student uncomfortable by touching her on the arm, suggesting she wear low-cut shirts and asking if she would ever pose in Playboy. The police report indicates the case was suspended, and Beierle continued teaching for another year before resigning.

Anne Arundel school officials, who noted that Beierle went through a criminal-background check when he was hired, said that all such incidents involving police are investigated by a team that can recommend anything from termination to no discipline. They would not say whether Beierle was punished.

It was just one of a series of episodes in which Beierle’s conduct with women led to him being questioned, arrested, fired or banned from private property — but never criminally convicted. In some cases, the woman or his employer declined to press charges. In others, prosecutors chose not to pursue them. It added up to a long record of harassment and assault accusations that did not turn up during cursory background checks.

In 2008, Beierle enlisted in the Army, completing officers’ school and becoming a second lieutenant. But by 2010 he was out for “unacceptable conduct.” Although he was still given an honorable discharge, Army documents reviewed by Tallahassee police show Beierle was investigated for inappropriate contact with female soldiers.

Beierle documented that episode, as he did many of his ruinous run-ins with women, in his bizarre catalogue of self-recorded music. In the lyrics, and a series of essays he wrote explaining them, he distills his anger at women into vengeance scenarios, including kidnapping and torture (“Locked in My Basement”), cannibalism (“Freshly Fried-up Girl”) and mass shooting (“I Will Not Touch You — My Bullets Will”).

He wrote more than 100 songs and managed to record more than two dozen of them. Some rail against women, some against minorities, the dilution of the white race, homosexuals and liberals. All are atonal howls of rage.

“He basically had zero talent musically,” said David Lauber, a Florida recording engineer who sold Beierle studio time at $50 an hour.

At one point, the wife of a friend who read the ultraviolent lyrics reported his website to the FBI through an Internet tip line. An FBI official confirmed that the bureau received the tip, one of almost 732,000 posted online in 2018, and reviewed the songs, determining them to be “unactionable.” Even violently themed lyrics are protected speech, the FBI official said, unless they target a particular person, place or event.

“In this situation, there wasn’t a specific threat,” the official said.

After the Army, Beierle moved to Tallahassee to attend graduate school. But the college town had other attractions. He wrote of making a pilgrimage to Ted Bundy’s boardinghouse, and to Sorority Row, where the serial killer strangled two women who belonged to Chi Omega in 1978, the year Beierle was born.

“Christians have their Via Delorosa in Jerusalem,” he wrote, “and I have mine.”

On a December afternoon in 2012, Courtnee Connon, an 18-year-old freshman, was in an undergraduate dining hall when she felt a hand firmly on her rear end. She whirled around and found Beierle, 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, denying he had touched her on purpose.

But a few minutes later, she saw him grope another woman, then a third. All three, she said, were wearing yoga pants.

Beierle was arrested and banned from the dining hall, but Connon decided not to press charges — a decision she said she now regrets. After two more similar incidents, FSU police barred him from campus.

At 36, Beierle had master’s degrees in public administration and planning, but his world was getting only smaller.

He found another job nearby as a substitute teacher in the Leon County school system, until he was fired for viewing porn at work. He made a run at stand-up in a comedy club, until bookers told him his anti-Semitic jokes were not welcome. And he tried to spark a social life through a Meetup.com group for local 20s and 30s.

“We called him Nazi Scott,” said a woman who belonged to the group. “He’d walk up and just start talking about weapons and killing people in the military and how Hitler was right to clear the human race of gays and Jews and blacks.”

One June afternoon in 2016, after a woman sunbathing by an apartment pool declined Beierle’s offer to apply tanning lotion, he grabbed and shook her buttocks. Charged with battery, he was diverted into mandatory counseling with a sex-addiction therapist. He dismissed therapy as one more “racket.”

“I’ve never gone to a psychiatrist of my own volition, nor would I ever,” he wrote in one online essay. “I have been ordered to visit one on 4 separate occasions though, dating back to high school, all having to do either with females or my mania.”

That fall, Beierle moved four hours southeast to Deltona, Fla., where Volusia County schools hired him as a substitute teacher. He was fired within a year for touching a female student on the midriff and asking if she was ticklish.

His existence, ridiculed in his song “My Glamorous Life,” became even more bleak. As his 40th birthday approached, he ate food from cans, according to his landlord, barely made eye contact with his neighbors and watched his bank account drain toward zero.

He began conducting Google searches for “yoga,” according to Tallahassee police investigator Daniel Warren, who spent months tracing Beierle’s movements. At first, it was yoga porn, but then he began looking for actual studios. Soon he was perusing the class schedule of one in particular: Hot Yoga Tallahassee.

Joshua Quick, the only man in the 5:30 class, doesn’t think Beierle saw him coming. He slammed the vacuum at Beierle’s head but the big man didn’t fall. Beierle swung the jammed Glock, catching Quick on the left side of his face, opening a three-inch gash over his eyebrow and sending the smaller man flying.

“I think he thought, ‘Okay, that takes care of that guy,’ ” Quick said.

But Quick grabbed a broomstick and ran to strike Beierle again. He doesn’t remember the stunning blow he took in return; his girlfriend tells him it was an elbow to the face. When his head cleared seconds later, Beierle was still there, but the other students had fled during their fight. Quick and his girlfriend followed.

When Beierle was ready to shoot again, the room seemed empty of the living. After an agonizing pause, the women who were wounded or hiding heard him say something unintelligible and then take one last shot, upward through his chin. The fall of his body was hard and final.

The misogynists rejoiced when they learned of the attack. Within hours of Beierle's suicide, hate-site habitues had dubbed him "St. Yogacel" and were scrambling to copy and share the online caches of his music and videos that so perfectly reflected their own worldview.

Incels celebrated his targeting of “spandex wearing yoga whores.” Racists hailed his rants against minorities, interracial dating, immigration and Muslims.

“This guy is a hero,” one poster declared. “Women belong in the house, taking care of family. Not going round yoga studios to fine tune their bodies for the pleasure of random strangers.”

But in the real world, something very different was unfolding.

The morning after the shooting, women from yoga classes all over the city rallied, unrolling their mats on a downtown street to show solidarity with the studio and to raise money for displaced staff. The owner of Hot Yoga Tallahassee, who declined to be interviewed, began remodeling the space, adding another exit door and other security measures. Two months later, the studio reopened.

Several of the women who survived the shooting have been back, including Kate Pierson.

“Now when I go in that room, it’s like going to my grandmother’s house even though I know she passed away there,” said Pierson, looking up at the second-floor studio from an outside table below. She was sitting outside the restaurant where she’d run for shelter as Beierle emptied his pistol. On a sunny spring day, it was full of diners, the parking lot was busy, a woman in workout clothes walked up the stairs for an afternoon class.

Quick has also returned, doing yoga in the place he did battle. His heroics are still being recognized — FSU paid for his law school expenses, Tallahassee gave him the key to the city. No one will forget what happened. But what happened won’t make them forget what the attacker tried to take.

“That was a sacred space where you would go to forget the rest of the world, and then the rest of world broke in,” Quick said. “It’s important that people have kept that peace in there. It didn’t change what that space still means.”

What it means on most nights: The scent of lemongrass still comforts, the waterfall still soothes, and the women still gather for yoga at 5:30.

#Resist

#BlackLivesMatter
Arrest The Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor

#BanTheNaziFromKB


Offline Athos_131

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Reply #485 on: June 08, 2019, 03:49:01 PM
A West Point cadet was sentenced to 21 years in prison for raping a sleeping classmate. Now, he's free to return to school.

Quote
In July 2016, U.S. Military Academy Cadet Jacob Whisenhunt was sentenced to 21 years in prison and discharged from the Army after being found guilty raping a female classmate as she slept in a nearby sleeping bag during Cadet Field Training at Camp Buckner. Whisenhunt's defense was that what transpired between him and the female cadet was consensual. But after a four-day trial, a jury of West Point faculty and staff found him guilty on three counts of sexual assault.

Now, an appeals court has thrown out Whisenhunt's conviction, vacating his sentence. And on Wednesday, the cadet returned to his class at West Point, according to The Associated Press.

The three appellate military judges who overturned Whisenhunt's conviction ruled that circumstantial evidence backed up Whisenhunt's defense that the act was consensual, based on the fact that the woman — identified by the initials LM — did not struggle loudly enough to alert other cadets who were sleeping nearby.

According to the Army Times, the female cadet testified that she froze when she woke up to discover Whisenhunt assaulting her, and remained in the fetal position for the duration of the intercourse. But the judges didn't seem to find that plausible.

"It is even harder to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that appellant would anticipate that LM would not make any reflexive noise or movements upon being awakened, which would have alerted multiple others to his criminal activity," the ruling reads. "This is particularly true when there is no evidence that appellant threatened LM or took any steps, such as covering her mouth, to prevent an outcry."

In their ruling Monday, the judges also cited the fact that the female cadet could easily identify Whisenhunt as one of her classmates, and the fact that he did not attempt to clean up the semen he left behind in her sleeping bag, as reasons to believe it must have been consensual.

Whisenhunt "would have needed to anticipate that LM would not report his crimes at a later date, when the record is devoid of any evidence that LM could not identify him, that she was incapacitated, or that he had threatened or coerced her," the judges wrote. "Furthermore, appellant left his semen on LM's bivy cover, and there is no evidence that he tried to remove this evidence."

"A horrible message"
Former Air Force chief prosecutor, retired Col. Don Christensen, told CBS News the ruling sends "a horrible message."

"Their opinion is victim-blaming," he said. "It reads like something from decades ago. Their two bases for overturning the conviction — one was that the victim didn't act the way they wanted, and the other was that the accused surely wouldn't rape somebody that he knew, which shows that these three judges haven't got a clue when it comes to what sexual assault looks like. So, it's just going to send an incredibly bad message to the survivor community."

In May, a survey released by the Department of Defense revealed that sexual assault in the military had spiked nearly 40% since 2016 — with an estimated 20,500 service members experiencing some kind of "contact or penetrative sexual assault" in 2018. While those numbers are staggering, they may still only represent a fraction of the sexual assaults that actually occur in the U.S. military, given that only about 1 in 3 service members report their experience of sexual assault to a Defense Department authority.

Col. Christensen, who now serves as the president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group with the mission of ending the epidemic of military rape, believes that this ruling will dissuade future victims from coming forward.

"Even now, when they do come forward, the odds of them getting a conviction are astronomically slim," he told CBS News. "You know, there were only 108 convictions last year in the military out of 7,000 reports, and so the numbers are against them. And then, when they actually do get a conviction, to have it overturned on such flimsy logic is just going to dissuade people from doing it. It's time for Congress to act on this; to be bold. They have been too slow to do anything really aggressive when it comes to sex assault in the military."

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Reply #486 on: June 12, 2019, 11:46:50 PM
Congresswoman chides ‘sex-starved males’ opposed to abortion rights

Quote
Rep. Norma J. Torres (D-Calif.) chastised House colleagues who are opposed to abortion rights, saying she was tired of hearing “from so many sex-starved males” about a woman’s right to choose.

Her remark Wednesday during a House debate on a spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services caused a stir and immediately, Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) asked Torres if she would like to amend her remarks. Torres agreed, but not before getting the line in one more time.

“If it pleases my colleague on the other side, I will withdraw my statement of sex-starved males on the floor,” she said.

Once a statement is withdrawn, it is stricken from the record. But C-SPAN’s feed from the floor is forever.

Torres began again, saying it is “tiring to be here on this floor or in committee as a woman to continue to be counseled about what types of affordable [care], whether it is family planning conversations, that rightfully I deserve to have with my own doctor, choosing when women want to have a family and to avoid pregnancy.”

Her initial comment was prompted by freshman Rep. Ross Spano (R-Fla.), who argued that the pending package of 2020 spending bills weakens protections against federal tax dollars being used to fund abortions.

“It is tiring,” she began, drawing out each word for added emphasis, “to hear from so many sex-starved males on this floor talk about a woman’s right to choose.”

Abortion rights have reemerged as a top issue as several Republican-led states have enacted laws to limit or end abortions. In response, many Democrats, including most of the candidates for president, have come out in favor of ending the 40-year limitation on federal funding for abortions, known as the Hyde Amendment.

A liberal bloc of Democrats pushed to strike the provision, named for former congressman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), from the spending bill. They sought to ensure abortions would be covered by government health programs such as Medicaid. But House leadership blocked their effort, unwilling to undermine the entire bill.

“Let me be clear on the Hyde Amendment: I would repeal it tomorrow,” said Rep. Katherine M. Clark (Mass.), vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus, on Monday, according to the Hill. But she said starting that debate would threaten everything else in the bill “that is so good for American families.”

Instead, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) told The Washington Post last week that House Democrats were focusing their efforts this year on reversing the Trump administration’s “gag rule” restricting health providers receiving federal funds from providing patients with information on abortions, eliminating the funding of abstinence-only sex education programs and increasing Title X funding to a new high of $400 million for fiscal 2020.

In an interview off the House floor, Torres explained why she felt compelled to say what she did about her male colleagues.

“You have to be pretty sex-starved to keep thinking about sex every single minute of your day and keep bringing this issue up on everything, whether it’s foreign aid, whether it’s domestic aid, whether it’s health care — they bring it up,” she said.

Woodall said there were no hard feelings, and that he did not take her comments as an insult toward him. They chatted amicably after but not about her remark.

“You will not find many members more passionate than Ms. Torres,” Woodall said, “but you will also not find many more delightful to spend time with.”

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Reply #487 on: June 22, 2019, 12:33:28 AM
Hideous Men Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago. But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life.

Quote
My first rich boy pulled down my underpants. My last rich boy pulled down my tights. My first rich boy — I had fixed my eyes on his face long enough to know — was beautiful, with dark gray eyes and long golden-brown hair across his forehead. I don’t know what he grew up to be. My last rich boy was blond. He grew up to be the president of the United States.

The first rich boy’s name was James. He was raped by his grandfather. He was raped by his uncles. He was beaten by his father. My mother told me the stories much later. When James was 6, he was taken away from his father and given to a rich couple, Arthur and Evelyn. Arthur and Evelyn were best friends with my parents, Tom and Betty. One day my parents gave a party. Everyone brought their kids. Arthur and Evelyn drove up from Indianapolis with James to the redbrick schoolhouse where we lived, deep in the hills north of Fort Wayne. As the parents drank cocktails in our big yard with the scent of the blooming wads of cash infusing every inch of Indiana just after WWII, the kids played up on the hill beside the schoolhouse.

James was 7 and a half or 8, a bloodthirsty, beautiful, relentless boy. He ordered everyone around, even the older kids. To me he said, “I’m going to shove this up you again.”

We’d played this game before. Our families had gone on a camping trip to Pokagon State Park, and I learned that an object could be shoved up the place where I tinkled. I don’t remember now what it was, probably a stick, or maybe a rock. It felt like being cut with a knife. I remember I bled.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

We were standing on the hill. James looked at me with his feral gray eyes.

He wadded up a piece of fabric — it was a light blue-violet shade and looked fluffy, like a bunched-up hairnet

“Put this in your underpants,” he said.

He pulled up my dress and crammed the balled-up material down my pants. Late at night, when the guests had gone home, I took off my dress, pulled down my pants. And there it still was, the wadded-up thing.

James and I played so many ferocious games while camping that summer: hooking each other with fishhooks, holding each other underwater, tying each other up, shooting each other with cap guns, chasing each other with garter snakes, dumping hot embers on each other’s heads. I am not putting him on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List — whether he belongs there is for him to decide. It is his uncles, his father, his grandfather who belong on such a list.

Now, about this Most Hideous Men of My Life List: It is a list of the 21 most revolting scoundrels I have ever met. I started it in October 2017, the day Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Harvey Weinstein bombshells in the New York Times. As the riotous, sickening stories of #MeToo surged across the country, I, like many women, could not help but be reminded of certain men in my own life. When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting. I considered Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, and the giant dingleberry Charlie Rose, all guys whose TV shows I was on many times and who made headlines during the rise of #MeToo. But in the end, they do not make my Hideous List.

Hunter S. Thompson … now, there’s a good candidate. I know. I wrote his biography. Does Hunter, the greatest degenerate of his generation, who kept yelling, “Off with your pants!” as he sliced the leggings from my body with a long knife in his hot tub, make the list? Naw.

And if having my pants hacked off by a man lit to the eyebrows with acid, Chivas Regal, Champagne, grass, Chartreuse, Dunhills, cocaine, and Dove Bars does not make the list — because to me there is a big difference between an “adventure” and an “attack” — who, in God’s name, does make my Hideous List?

After almost two years of drawing and redrawing my list, I’ve come to realize that, though my hideosity bar is high, my criteria are a little cockeyed. It is a gut call. I am like Justice Potter Stewart. I just know a hideous man when I see one. And I have seen plenty. For 26 years, I have been writing the “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle, and for 26 years, no matter what problems are driving women crazy — their careers, wardrobes, love affairs, children, orgasms, finances — there comes a line in almost every letter when the cause of the correspondent’s quagmire is revealed. And that cause is men.

Viz.: the man who thinks 30 seconds of foreplay is “enough,” the man who cheats on his wife, the man who passes women over for promotion, the man who steals his girlfriend’s credit cards, the man who keeps 19 guns in the basement, the man who tells his co-worker she “talks too much in meetings,” the man who won’t bathe, the man who beats his girlfriend’s dog, the man who takes his female colleagues’ ideas, the man who tries to kill his rich wife by putting poison in her shampoo. Every woman, whether consciously or not, has a catalogue of the hideous men she’s known.

As it turns out, a Hideous Man marks practically every stage of my life. And so, Reader, from this cavalcade of 21 assholes, I am selecting a few choice specimens. One or two may not be pleasant for you to read about, I apologize. But if we all just lean over and put our heads between our knees, the fainting feeling will pass. No one need be carried from the room.

When I entered Indiana University, I was the most boy-crazy 17-year-old in the nation.

If you’d met me my freshman year, you would never have imagined I was born to be an advice columnist. But imagine it now. Thirteen miles from the Bloomington campus, there I am: young Jeanie Carroll, driving with a boy down a hilly back road in Brown County State Park, where IU students go on October Sundays to supposedly look at the famous leaves.

My situation in life — my father being a Beta Theta Pi from Wabash College, my mother being a Kappa Delta from UCLA, my wild wish to pledge either Pi Beta Phi or Kappa Kappa Gamma, my rah-rah disposition, my total ignorance of what is going on in the world, the fact that I never crack a book — all are equally against my becoming a columnist, the first requirement of which is acknowledging that there are other beings on the planet besides boys.

How I end up in that car, who the boy is … well, I don’t remember. I’ve been looking through my 1961 datebook, and each day is so chock-full of the names of boys who called me, the names of boys whom I expected to call me and didn’t, the names of boys who did call me but I didn’t care if they called me, the names of boys who if they didn’t call me I was never going to speak to again, the names of boys who if they called me I would not pick up the phone, and the names of boys I would have my roommate, Connie, call and ask if they called me while she was on the line with a boy who was begging me to call him back, I can’t figure out who this boy is. But meet No. 1 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List.

He belongs to that class of boys who are not athletes and so must make their mark on campus with their devastating looks or gobs of money. I don’t remember this boy having either. I remember this boy’s thing is his car. It is a stick shift. Nobody knows how to “drive a stick,” he says, except him and A. J. Foyt, the Indianapolis 500 winner, and so I am amazed when he releases the clutch like he’s stepping on a yellow-jacket nest and grinds the gears when he pulls over in the dirt and stops.

I look around. “I gotta get back to the dorm,” I say.

He turns off the engine.

“Youuuuuuuu liiiitttttttttllllllllllll prrrrrrrrrrrrik teeeeeeeeeeez,” he says. This opening compliment, “You little prick tease,” is paid to every girl at some point or other in 1961, and I don’t wait to be paid another. I open the car door and slide out.

What am I wearing? Tennis shoes, jeans, big sweatshirt, and — blam, he lunges from the car and bolts his arms around me. We crash, like felled trees, to the ground.

We land in grass covered in yellow leaves. Thanks to Mr. Weber, my high-school biology teacher, I can, with 100 percent confidence, say those yellow leaves are poplar leaves. They crackle as I struggle to get up.

Straddling me, the boy looks zonked out of his mind with the possibilities. He pushes my sweatshirt up to my neck.

I remember the thought flashes through my mind that could I have foreseen the circumstance of a boy throwing me down and pushing my sweatshirt up to my chin, I would not have worn a padded bra. A padded bra makes a girl look like she lacks something.

“I don’t want to wrestle,” I say. “Get off!”

He pins my arms over my head by my wrists.

“Get off!” I say again.

He is holding my wrists with both his hands, and, before I can react, he changes his hold to one hand and, with his free hand, pulls a knife out of his back pocket.

“See this?” he whispers.

I look at it. At the time, I own two Girl Scout knives, a Girl Scout knife-safety certificate, and my own personal hatchet, and the neighbor kids believe I have reached a height of felicity rarely attained on Illsley Place, our street, because of my winning 30 rounds of mumblety-peg, a game where we throw pocketknives at each other’s bare feet. So, yes, I can “see” his knife. It’s a jackknife, a knife with a folding blade, dark brownish-gray, made out of some kind of horn, about five or six inches. If he opens it, it will measure, end to end, 10 or 11 inches. It’s not the knife. Well, it is the knife, but it’s the look on his face that scares me.

“Get off,” I say.

He pushes my bra up over my breasts. I can smell his excitement; it’s like electrified butter, and I zero in on the fact that he must use two hands to open the knife.

“Get off!” I say.

“I am gonna get off,” he whispers.

He lets go of both of my wrists for two seconds to open the knife, and I roll out from under him and run.

I was voted Best Girl Athlete in high school, but I was a high jumper, not a runner. I outrun this boy nonetheless. And on a twisty back road through tangled orange-and-scarlet thickets, a young couple in a car pick me up about a quarter-hour after I escape. The girl says, “I’ll bet a boy tried something with you,” and I say, “Yeah,” and that is the last word I utter about the attack until now.

Had I been an artist, I could have carried the front seat of the car the boy was driving wherever I went on Indiana University’s campus to protest his assault like Emma Sulkowicz carrying her mattress around Columbia University in the greatest art show of 2014, but I didn’t think of it. Perhaps hauling around just the gearshift would have sufficed. But, like many women who are attacked, when I had the most to say, I said the least.

Let’s just double-check my diary: Do I write that I went to the campus police and reported the boy? Do I say I went to the university health clinic and talked with a therapist? No. I say:

BE IT KNOWN—

That from this day forth I will not except [sic] or go on any dates that are not of my choice — they must be boys who are to my liking [I can’t read what I crossed out here]. I have to [sic] many things to do — rather than waste my time with CREEPY BOYS.

(signed) Jeanie Carroll


After college and bumming around Africa, I arrive in Chicago, ready to start my so-called career. I meet one of those semi-good-looking, brown-haired, unimpeachably but forgettably dressed young men who are vice-presidents because their fathers own the company, in this case an employment agency–and–accounting firm–type thing, which, despite the gloss of its golden promise, no longer exists.

He hires me to help “land new accounts.”

“You start tonight,” he says.

“Great!” I say.

“We’re meeting the people from Marshall Field’s. Be at the Pump Room at eight o’clock.”

“Wow!” I say. “The Pump Room!”

Congo-green paisley taffeta dinner suit, whisk-broom eyelashes, Rorschach-inkblot eye shadow, stacked heels, Marquis de Sade hair bow, and skirt up to here, I arrive in the Pump Room. I remember lots of white linen. Sparkling silver. The maître d’ escorts me to a booth, where No. 13 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List rises to greet me and says, “They canceled.”

“Oh dear,” I reply.

“Never mind,” he says. “Sit down.”

He orders drinks, an extra glass of ice, tells me in detail about the new suit he is wearing, and then says, surprised, “Oh damn! My ex-wife just walked in.”

My false eyelashes spring open like parasols.

A smashingly put-together woman with a flamboyant mane of rich red hair is being escorted with an older chap (he is probably all of 35) to a table across the room. When they are seated, my boss raises his glass to her. She nods and raises one eyebrow at him.

“She’s a cunt,” he says.

Ten minutes later, an odd thing happens. My boss’s ex-wife takes her chap’s hand and raises it to her lips. A moment later, my boss takes my hand and raises it to his lips.

I jerk my hand away.

“Just a welcome smooch,” he says. “Don’t be bourgeois.”

He orders another drink. Across the room, my boss’s ex-wife glances at us and puts her two very, very red open lips on her chap’s cheek and — well, there is no verb available — squishes her lips up and down and sorta rolls them around his face like she is the press-and-steam girl at a dry cleaner.

After she concludes, my boss picks up the glass filled with ice, globs in a mouthful, crunches it for a few seconds, and then plants his freezing lips and tongue on my face.

I nearly fly out of the booth.

“GET OFF!” I cry. “Ewwwwwww!”

“You’re soooo booooooozzzzshwaaaaahh,” says my boss.

“Keep it in your mouth, mister!” I say. “Where’s the waiter? I need more bread and butter!”

I am not a foodie. Give me a three-cheese foot-long with a mound of red onions on it or a couple of Amy’s organic black-bean burritos and I’m happy. But wild, half-witted, greener-than-green Jeanie Carroll, 50 years before #MeToo, 40 years before women even begin expecting things could be different Jeanie Carroll, who takes her licks and doesn’t look back, is not about to pass up a dinner in the goddamn Pump Room!

I have the filet mignon. (One of the last times I ever eat meat, so disgusting is this night.)

My boss? He orders another drink and becomes more and more excited, slobbering on my hand like a Doberman playing with his squeaky toy, and meanwhile my boss’s ex-wife — who I now, half a century later, suspect was actually his wife and this was a little game they played to spice things up — starts rubbing her chap’s leg.

My boss and I can’t really see her doing it, as the table linen hangs nearly to the floor, but it is clear from the feverish action of her upper body that she is rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, and when her chap’s eyes close, she goes on rubbing until, with his face still smeared with lipstick and looking like a sophomore standing on the free-throw line in a tied game, the chap stands up, heaves a wad of cash on the table, grabs the wife, and they scamper toward the exit. My boss asks for the check.

My Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight room in the old Hotel Eastgate on Ontario Street no longer exists. But at the time, it is only a dozen or so blocks away, and my boss insists on driving me home. It is my first ride in a Mercedes. I am surprised at how uncomfortable the stiff leather seats are. Two or three blocks from my place, my boss runs a red light, stomps the brakes, skids to a halt, and, jabbering about “that cunt” or “a cunt” or “all cunts,” jams his hand between my legs so hard I bang my head into the dashboard trying to protect myself. I open the car door and bound into the traffic.

My boss must be doing the following things: pulling over, getting out, etc., because as I am about to turn in to the Hotel Eastgate, I look back and see him weaving toward me in a drunken trot. I remember that his legs look menacingly short. I run into the empty hotel lobby. Spurt past the desk. No manager in sight. Check the elevators. Decide to take the stairs two at a time. Hit the second floor. Feeling for the room key in my jacket pocket, I run down the hall, and as I try to put the key in the door, my boss catches me from behind and clamps his teeth on the nape of my neck. I kick backward at his shins, manage to get the key to work, jab a backward elbow into his ribs, squeeze into my room, and push, push, push the door closed.

Have you ever shut a dog outside who wants to come in? My boss scratches and whimpers at that door for the next quarter of an hour. The next day, I get a new job — and never has my lack of all talent been put to better advantage — as a greeter-and-seater at Gino’s East, the Chicago pizza joint beloved by mob guys, journos, and TV glamorosi, and do not so much as call No. 13 to tell him I quit.

Do I attract hideous men? Possibly. But I’ve also encountered many creeps, villains, dickwads,and chumps simply because I’ve been around a long time. I was mostly single, free of encumbrances, and working in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when a woman could scarcely walk down the street without getting hit on or take a job without being underpaid.

So … we may proceed to No. 15 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: Les Moonves, chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of the CBS Corporation.

This happens in the time — one of the happiest of my happy life — when I am booming around the country writing for Esquire. I have been interviewing Moonves in the lounge of the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills for a story (presciently titled by my editor “Dangerous Minds,” February 1997), and the short, gravel-voiced Moonves apparently takes one look at me — a 50-something journalist in a pair of old brown-and-beige oxfords — and his life is no longer his own.

After the interview is finished (and for a man like Moonves, talking about himself for an hour and a half is as good as downing two gallons of Spanish fly), he follows me to the elevator. When I turn to say good-bye, he says: “You’re smart.”

I say: “Thank you!”

He says: “Smart enough to choose an out-of-the-way hotel,” and he steps into the elevator behind me and, his pants bursting with demands, goes at me like an octopus. I don’t know how many apertures and openings you possess, Reader, but Moonves, with his arms squirming and poking and goosing and scooping and pricking and prodding and jabbing, is looking for fissures I don’t even know I own, and — by God! — I am not certain that even if I pull off one of his arms it won’t crawl after me and attack me in my hotel bed. Hell, I am thrilled I escape before he expels his ink.

Naturally, I do not mention this in the article. I am a member of the Silent Generation. We do not flap our gums. We laugh it off and get on with life. (Moonves, for his part, told New York he “emphatically denies” the incident occurred.)

By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap? Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything. But mainly, I think it is because I have done the thing no Indiana University football team has ever done in history — I have won a national championship: Miss Cheerleader USA. And they fly me to Washington, D.C., to meet President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden. My photo (in a swimsuit!) plays on front pages across the nation. I get a big scholarship and appear on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth.

This championship is, in fact, so important to the Indiana athletic department that they put me on billboards all over the state of Indiana — giant images of an ecstatic Jeanie escaped from her bottle, soaring above the stunned crowd in the Indiana University football stadium, a big i on my crimson sweater, cheerleading skirt aswirl, legs split like the atom.

And, well, I’ve never really come down … have I?

I’m up there, perpetually, eternally, forever in mid-leap, urging the crowd to never lose hope. I was a cheerleader in grade school. I was a cheerleader in high school. My sisters, Cande and Barbie, were cheerleaders; my brother, Tom, was a pole vaulter, so he jumped too. Today I open a letter for my column, I read the question, and what do I do? I start shouting and yelling and cheering at the correspondent to pick herself up and go on. And, by God! The correspondent does pick herself up and does go on! Because if she doesn’t, I keep yelling at her. And every now and then I shout at myself, “Get the hell up, E. Jean! You half-wit! My God! Get on with it!”

And many women my age just “get on with it” too. It is how we handle things: Chin up! Stop griping! We do not cast ourselves as victims because we do not see ourselves as victims. While the strategy has worked for me, I wish I hadn’t waited so long to say something about two of my Hideous Men.

Beauty contests are such a rage when I am growing up that my camp — a Girl Scout camp! — holds yearly pageants. So it happens that the first beauty contest I am nominated for is Miss Camp Ella J. Logan. (Later I’ll win Miss Indiana University, no doubt due to my “talent”: I take to the stage dressed as Edith Sitwell and perform a dramatic reading of Dick and Jane.)

There is no talent portion at camp, alas. We contestants walk up and down the dock; the judges, who’ve roared across the lake in a magnificent Chris-Craft and who are now seated in deck chairs, call my name.

I walk over and whisper: “What?”

They whisper: “You are Miss Camp Ella J. Logan.”

After they put the papier-mâché crown on my head, the cape on my shoulders, and give me the baton covered in Reynolds Wrap, Old Cam, No. 6 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List, the waterfront director, takes me out in a boat and runs his hands under my shirt and up my shorts. He is breathing and moving his hand slowly and hotly, and I fight no battles in my head. My mind goes white. This is Cam. This is the man who has watched me grow from an 8-year-old Brownie Scout, and his notice is an honor. This is Cam, who teaches me to swim and dive and awards me the coveted White Cap! This is Cam, who continues to run his hand inside my shorts and under my blouse — even in the dining room during dinner, under the table, squeezing my thighs, shoving his fingers — saying, “You’re my girl. You’re my girl. You’re my girl,” and making me Girl Scout–promise “not to tell anyone.”

He does this until I go home. I am 12.

My friends will be stunned to read this. My sisters and brother will be speechless. But Aly Raisman, the great Olympian gymnast, and the more than 150 young women who spoke out in court about Lawrence Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor, will not be shocked. Nassar abused some of the young women in front of their own mothers. Nobody saw it.

And old Cam? He writes a book called The Girl Scout Man. It is listed in “rather remarkable” condition, though there is some “light foxing and some very modest yellowing of the pages,” on Abe Books, the rare-books dealer. Here is a shortened version of its description:

“This loving homage to Girl Scouting is a record of many of the experiences and incidents and occurrences spanning the over twenty-five years of dedicated service of Cam Parks, done mostly at Camp Ella J. Logan, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the shore of Dewart Lake. If you, Reader, are an alumnus of Logan … memories of time spent at this camp may well be sweeping over you right now.”

No thank you.

As a Scout, I returned to Camp Ella J. Logan year after year, becoming tall and womanly, receiving letters from boys with swak written on the backs of the envelopes, going on weeklong canoe trips, and completing my counselor-in-training program.

Cam I avoided. Never once did I speak to him or look at him again, but my brain does not avoid him. He and his maroon swim trunks may have been dead these last 40 years, but old Cam and the boat are the events — of all the events in my life — that somehow swim constantly back into my head. And it’s Cam who, when he dies at the age of 72 and the story starts going around that he was “suddenly dismissed” from coaching, causes me the most pain.

I could have spoken up! Maybe not when I was 12. But when I was 25. He died when I was 34. I might have stopped him.

Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.

His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.

This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).

Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”

And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”

I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.

“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”

“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”

“A girl,” he says.

“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.

“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.

As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”

“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.

“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”

I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.

“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”

What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.

“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.

“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.

“I’m 52,” I tell him.

“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.

I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and

I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.

There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”

“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”

“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.

“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.

“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”

“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.

“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”

This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!

There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:

Did I report it to the police?

No.

Did I tell anyone about it?

Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.

“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)

Do I have photos or any visual evidence?

Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.

Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?

Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.

Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.

So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.

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Reply #488 on: June 22, 2019, 12:35:12 AM
Let me get this out of the way. 

To the dismissers of these accounts, victim blamers, and other misogynists that will reply to the previous post and this thread in general.

Go Fuck Yourselves.

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Reply #489 on: June 24, 2019, 06:45:11 PM
E. Jean Carroll on Trump's Denial of Alleged Sexual Assault: 'I'm Sick of It'

Quote
Columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused President Donald Trump of raping her in an excerpt of her upcoming memoir What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal published to the Cut on Friday, is tired of the runaround.

Appearing on CNN on Monday morning, Carroll explained Trump’s process of denying his accusers, and the public forgetting about the women who have alleged that Trump has sexually harassed or assaulted them. According to Vox, at least 21 women have accused Trump of behavior ranging from sexual misconduct to assault.

“He denies it, he turns it around, he attacks, and he threatens. And, then everybody forgets it, and the next woman comes along, and I am sick of it. Alysin, I am sick of it,” she said.

In her memoir excerpt, Carroll wrote that Trump raped her in a dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. Trump has denied Carroll’s allegation, telling reporters over the weekend that he had “no idea” who Carroll is, and that he had never met her. From the New York Times:

“It’s a total false accusation,” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about her. She’s made this charge against others, and you know, people have to be careful, because they are playing with very dangerous territory.”

Referring to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court amid sexual assault allegations, Mr. Trump said, “When you look at what happened to Justice Kavanaugh, and you look at what’s happening to others, you can’t do that for the sake of publicity.”

He added: “It’s a totally false accusation. I have absolutely no idea who she is. There’s some picture where we’re shaking hands. It looks like at some kind of event. I have my coat on. I have my wife standing next to me.”


On CNN, Carroll continued, detailing the only means that she and other Trump accusers have in pushing back against his denials.

“Think how many women have come forward, nothing happens. The only thing we can do is,” Carroll said, rolling her eyes, “sit with you, and tell our stories, so that we empower other women to come forward and tell their stories because we have to change this culture of sexual violence.”

Carroll denied to CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that she came forward for political purposes, saying she didn’t even know of who is currently running for president. “No, I’m not organized, that is the last thing—all I want to do—well I’m just fed up, I’m just fed up with what’s been going on with the women and the sexual...,” she trailed off.

“I can’t believe that he is in the White House,” Carroll said. “And it makes me sick. What else can I do but just tell my story.”

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Reply #490 on: June 26, 2019, 03:16:43 AM
America must listen to E. Jean Carroll. It’s clear Trump won’t.

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TRUMP, following the latest of more than a dozen allegations of sexual assault against him, did not say that he would never touch a woman without her consent. He said, instead, “She’s not my type.”

The crudeness and cruelty of this response to a woman’s recounting of trauma are not surprising. Mr. Trump has said similar things before. But neither the president’s callousness nor advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s accusation in New York magazine that he attacked her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago can be met with a shrug.

Ms. Carroll says Mr. Trump, in the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996, asked for help buying lingerie for “a girl.” Then, in the dressing room, she says, he pushed her against the wall and pulled down her tights and assaulted her. Ms. Carroll did not report the incident to the police, but she did tell two close friends at the time, both of whom have corroborated her account. The Manhattan department store no longer has security tapes from that time.

Mr. Trump claims that Ms. Carroll, in addition to not being his type, is “totally lying.” As a matter of principle, everyone deserves a presumption of innocence. But in Mr. Trump’s case, that has to be tempered by what we know. We know that Mr. Trump routinely traffics in falsehoods. We know that he has shown contempt for the law in many contexts. And we know that Mr. Trump has boasted about assaulting women — grabbing them, as he said during a 2005 conversation on an “Access Hollywood” bus, “by the p---y.” In this context, Ms. Carroll’s allegation is consistent, credible — and horrifying. She writes in her essay published last Friday, “He opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.” Recall Mr. Trump’s words: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Just as we cannot ignore the disdain for the truth and the law that defines this administration simply because we have grown to expect it, we cannot ignore an allegation of sexual assault against the president simply because others have come before it. The United States still has to function with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, but greeting the grossest abuses as routine veers too close to treating them as acceptable. At the least, the country must do for Ms. Carroll what the president will not: Listen to her.

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Reply #491 on: June 26, 2019, 03:19:34 AM
The Familiar Despair of E. Jean Carroll's Testimony

Quote
The essay that writer E. Jean Carroll published in New York last week was designed, with every muster of magazine bona fides, to mark an event. From the cover—a picture of Carroll in the coat she says she was wearing when Donald Trump, then real estate tycoon now president, allegedly raped her in the dressing room at Bergdorf; a design that harkens purposefully to another tale of political power run amok—to the near constant churn of follow-ups, press releases, and analysis the magazine has been spitting onto the site since the piece published.

Yet the most powerful trick is a rhetorical one: the very construction of Carroll’s essay, an excerpt from her forthcoming book What Do We Need Men For, uses her copious writing gifts and a powerful narrative structure to ensure that both subject and story made a case for their own accuracy. The setup buries its lead only to resurrect it as a punchline; Carroll writes of the alleged assault with specific, rigorous detail only after anticipating the arguments against her and meeting them with a defense. (She refers to these arguments, crushingly, as her “great handicaps.”) Carroll joins a group of least 15 women who have accused the president of sexual assault, a roster whose names she lists.

The evidence is laid out gingerly; it is, after all, a 6000-word essay that uses the word “rape” only four times, just twice in reference to Trump, passively spoken by a friend whose words, the magazine is quick to disclose, have been fact-checked. (The line: “‘He raped you,’” she kept repeating when I called her. “‘He raped you.’”)

Where were the sales clerks? Why is there no video recording? Why didn’t she report? Carroll foresees these critiques and prostrates herself to them. That such incidents rarely manifest themselves in perfect terms, that perhaps if there had been witnesses an attacker might have behaved differently, that a video can be a flawed way of capturing sexual violence, that the 50-some years of such violence chronicled in the bulk of Carroll’s essay might ingrain in a person a sense of futility, a lesson in powerlessness. Such arguments are both reasonable and obvious; that she knows she must make them is wrenching.

It’s a presentation that evokes another woman asked to give indisputable testimony against a powerful political man: Christine Blasey Ford. Though the tool at Ford’s disposal was science, not language, as she too framed her story to counter its flaws. That she failed to remember the specifics surrounding a 30-year-old incident, but could nonetheless recount the alleged assault with exacting precision, was explained using Ford’s knowledge of the brain. This technical language—“norepinephrine” and “epinephrine” and “neurotransmitters”—reinforced her value as a narrator, providing a perfectly constructed testimony to defend with chemical basis why, as Ford said, the memories of the alleged assault are “locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.”

Both narratives are constructed using the same terrible playbook—an airtight defense disguised as testimony, created with the presupposition that its author will not be believed. It’s a playbook that’s becoming common, because the presupposition is correct.

Already, the absence of effect has become the story of Carroll’s allegation—not concrete impacts (impeachment! felony charges!) but attention and outrage, as glimpsed through the proxy of media. The basic oversights have been recounted: that the New York Times published their story in the books section, an article that according to one reporter’s watch failed to rise into the roughly 164 headlines featured on the paper’s homepage; that those scanning the news found the story omitted from the lead news items of most papers of record; that, as a bluntly phrased Columbia Journalism Review headline put it, “E Jean Carroll’s Trump Rape Claim Did Not Get Enough Coverage.”

“We were overly cautious,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said on Monday, an explanation that did little to diffuse the fact that the paper’s quick coverage had, nonetheless, taken the time to re-corroborate Carroll’s story with the two friends she spoke to after the alleged assault—a detail that New York had already explicitly, prominently fact-checked—and that Trump’s un-corroborated denial ran in the National section.

Most telling is what was published. While the details of Carroll’s accusation have largely been the purview of opinion writers, Trump’s bombastic statement, and increasingly agitated denials have been written about with excruciating specificity. “She’s not my type,” quickly spawned a phalanx of news stories playing off the idiotic quip, to join headlines that emphasize Trump’s strength and agency. He “vehemently denies,” he “rejected an allegation,” he “emphatically denies.” (That last one is the Times again.) By Monday evening CNN, one of the many sites that brushed past Carroll’s story over the weekend, was reporting allegations that New York Post had removed their story at the behest of a Trump-supporting executive, a next beat that only highlighted this disparate emphasis.

Already arguments are surfacing to brush off this gap: that the feeble coverage of Carroll’s story is a result of a Friday news drop, a competitive newspaper culture, a press that’s uncomfortable with first-person reports, and fatigue at the additional allegation against an already sullied president, who has been gifted a base that appears fortified by reports of assault. “We know Donald Trump’s character, and it’s revealed every single day,” Elizabeth Warren told a reporter shortly after the story published. “There aren’t any real surprises—just the details.”

But the classification of these details is striking, and studied en masse they portray the kind of world that Carroll’s story was preparing to enter. Because the words and actions of the president—regardless of how petty, how baseless—will always remain the domain of news, while the words and recounting of the woman he allegedly assaulted—no matter how exactingly constructed her story, how righteous her message, how broad her platform—will remain fodder for analysis.

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Reply #492 on: June 28, 2019, 02:31:12 AM
Family Of Murdered Utah Track Athlete Lauren McCluskey Sues School Over "Deliberate Indifference" Before Her Death

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The parents of Lauren McCluskey filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Utah and several administrators on Thursday over the school’s alleged failure to take their daughter’s calls for help seriously before she was murdered, as well as their subsequent investigation of McCluskey’s death that resulted in nobody from the school being disciplined. McCluskey, a track and field athlete at the university, was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend last October, three weeks after she began warning campus safety officials and the Salt Lake City PD that she might be in danger.

The lawsuit comes months after the school ruled that McCluskey’s death could not have been prevented, despite the numerous warnings. In an email to ESPN, Lauren’s mother Jill McCluskey said:

“No one has been disciplined or held accountable in the campus police or housing. The same culture prevails in the campus police. There is no significant change. Initially we were not planning to file a lawsuit, but President (Ruth) Watkins refused to take any responsibility or hold anyone accountable for the failures that resulted in Lauren’s murder.”

Jill said the suit was a “last resort to affect positive change” after the investigatory process ended without any serious responsibility being taken by University officials for her daughter’s death. Utah did release 30 recommendations to make their campus safer for students, though they did not uncover “any reason to believe this tragedy could have been prevented.”

Before she was killed on Oct. 22, McCluskey reached out to campus housing officials, campus police, and city police about Melvin Rowland, who she had recently stopped dating after discovering that he was a 37-year-old registered sex offender on parole, not a 28-year-old community college student as he had told her. McCluskey was on the phone with her mother when Rowland kidnapped her on campus the day she was killed.

The suit seeks $56 million in damages, and Jill McCluskey told ESPN a settlement could help compel insurance companies to force schools to take the safety of female students more seriously. Any damages recovered will go to the Lauren McCluskey Foundation, which supports charity work focused on campus safety, amateur athletics, and animal welfare.

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Reply #493 on: June 28, 2019, 02:34:47 AM
Why E. Jean Carroll, ‘the Anti-Victim,’ Spoke Up About Trump

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E. Jean Carroll tore through the doors of the Fifth Avenue entrance of Bergdorf Goodman, her heart racing.

Ms. Carroll, a journalist and the host of the “Ask E. Jean” television show at the time, had taped a segment that day in 1996 at a studio in Fort Lee, N.J. When it ended around 5 p.m., she decided to come into Manhattan to shop at her favorite store.

From the sidewalk, she phoned Lisa Birnbach, a friend and author of “The Official Preppy Handbook.” Ms. Carroll was laughing at first as she described an encounter she said she had just had in a Bergdorf’s dressing room with Donald J. Trump that began as cheeky banter. But what she was saying didn’t strike Ms. Birnbach as funny. “I remember her being very overwrought,” Ms. Birnbach said in an interview. “I remember her repeatedly saying, ‘He pulled down my tights, he pulled down my tights.’” When Ms. Carroll finished her account, Ms. Birnbach said, “I think he raped you.”

“Let’s go to the police,” she recalled telling Ms. Carroll. But Ms. Carroll refused. A day or two later, she described the episode to another friend, Carol Martin, a TV host at the same network. She advised Ms. Carroll to stay silent.

“These traumas stay with you,” Ms. Martin said. “I didn’t know what to do except listen.”

The three women didn’t speak about the incident again until Ms Carroll began preparing for her forthcoming book, they said. It became public last week when Ms. Carroll, in a New York magazine excerpt from the book, accused the president of sexually assaulting her years ago. It was the most serious of multiple allegations women have made against him, all of which he has denied.

Ms. Birnbach and Ms. Martin, who haven’t previously spoken publicly about Ms. Carroll’s account, say they are doing so now to bolster their friend, especially since she has been attacked in recent days by skeptics and some supporters of Mr. Trump.

“I saw some horrible things that people were posting on social media,” Ms. Birnbach said. “I believe E. Jean in this episode that she recounted to me in 1996. Yes. Without hesitation. She’s not a fabulist.” She added, “She doesn’t make things up.”

Mr. Trump has said that Ms. Carroll was “totally lying,” that he didn’t know her and that “she’s not my type.”

In media interviews in recent days, Ms. Carroll, who once wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” has been confident. Asked on MSNBC why she made her accusation in a book, she replied: “What? A woman is not allowed to take a pen and put it to a piece of paper?” (“That didn’t go over very well,” she said in an interview later.) On CNN, she explained why she preferred the word “fight” to “rape”: “I think most people think rape is sexy. Think of the fantasies.” (She explained later that she was referring to romance novels that depict men ravishing women. “This was not thrilling, this was a fight,” she said. “A fight where I’m stamping on his feet and I think I’m banging him on the head with my purse.”)

Those public appearances are in keeping with how friends describe her: the girlfriend who would ride a Yugoslav freighter to Tangier; the plucky author of a popular column who dispensed advice on every aspect of her devoted readers’ lives, from sex to careers, but kept her own struggles private. She is a former Miss Cheerleader USA turned journalist, whose gonzo-style approach led The New York Times in 1981 to call her “feminism’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson.”

“The thing with E. Jean is she doesn’t adhere to a script,” said Marilyn Johnson, an author and longtime friend. “She’s a total original.”

‘She Was Fearless’
Ms. Carroll, now 75, grew up Betty Jean Carroll outside Huntertown, Ind., though her family and oldest friends call her Jeanie. She spent more than a decade living on a ranch in Montana, changed her name to Elizabeth Jean, then shortened it in her first Esquire byline to “E. Jean.” She now lives in upstate New York, on what she calls “an island” of secluded forest near the Appalachian Trail. Her home, which she shares with a cat named Vagina T. Fireball, is a small cottage painted with black and white stripes, with polka dots on the chimney. “It’s like part refuge, part fortress, part headquarters,” said Lisa Chase, her editor at Outside magazine and later at Elle, where Ms. Carroll has written the “Ask E. Jean” column for more than 20 years. “If you go there, look in the oven. I think she’s got a lot of books in there.”

Ms. Carroll often wears workwear-style jumpsuits, of which she has more than a dozen in varying shades. “Try to get this unzipped,” she said to a reporter, standing up in a restaurant. “Go ahead! Good luck.” She is an archer who keeps five arrows, along with a bow and a quiver, above her fireplace. “I’m a crack shot,” she said.

When she wanted to profile Hunter S. Thompson, she showed up at his house in Colorado and all but moved in. She later wrote that the two had become intimately involved, and had done acid together. For Esquire, she profiled Dan Rather and Lyle Lovett (she asked him his penis size), and she persuaded the humor writer Fran Lebowitz to go camping with her for an article in Outside. For Playboy, she trekked across Papua New Guinea for a story “in search of primitive man.” In 1995, when Ms. Carroll found a lump in her breast, she brought a film crew to her surgery — and aired it on her television show.

“She was incapable of being uninteresting, or writing a boring sentence,” said Bill Tonelli, her editor at Esquire. “She was fearless.”

She co-founded a dating website in 2002 called Greatboyfriends.com — where women could recommend their exes — and later, a matchmaking service called Tawkify. (Greatboyfriends sold to The Knot in 2005 for $600,000.) But, she revealed in the New York magazine excerpt, she has not had sex since the encounter with Mr. Trump that day in the dressing room.

“I just was not lucky enough to meet someone,” she said in an interview. “The desire for desire was over.”

In her book, “What Do We Need Men For?,” which comes out on Tuesday, she describes “hideous men” in her life. In addition to Mr. Trump, the list includes the former CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, who she said groped her in a hotel elevator when she interviewed him for a 1997 Esquire story; a childhood camp friend who sexually assaulted her as a young girl; and her second husband, the television personality John Johnson, whom she described as physically abusive.

Mr. Moonves has denied Ms. Carroll’s account of his groping. Reached by phone, Mr. Johnson declined to comment.

Confidantes provided some corroboration of Ms. Carroll’s claims. Nancy Hass, a writer for The Times’s T Magazine, said that in the late 1990s, Ms. Carroll mentioned having been groped by Mr. Moonves, but didn’t go into detail. “E. Jean is the anti-victim,” Ms. Hass said in an interview. “She can’t bear pity.”

Another friend, a former news producer named C. C. Dyer, said in an interview that she was with Ms. Carroll one morning and saw red marks on her neck, a ripped nightgown and bloodshot eyes after what Ms. Carroll said was an altercation with Mr. Johnson, an incident described in the book. Ms. Dyer said she told her husband at the time, Geraldo Rivera, about it. (A Fox News spokeswoman said Mr. Rivera was traveling and not available for an interview.)

Ms. Dyer was among more than a dozen former colleagues, family members and friends interviewed by The Times who attested to Ms. Carroll’s credibility.

“It’s inconceivable to me that she would make up a story like this,” said Stephen Byers, a former editor at National Geographic and her first husband, referring to the Trump allegation. He and Ms. Carroll were married for more than a decade. “She’s a very honorable woman.”

Still, there are unresolved questions about Ms. Carroll’s accusations, including the absence of any witnesses or, apparently, staff in the lingerie department at Bergdorf’s, and the lack of physical evidence. She has acknowledged that her response afterward — when she called her friend, laughing — may appear odd, but she attributes it to being in shock. In her book, she was hazy about whether the incident had taken place in 1995 or 1996; after recent conversations with Ms. Birnbach, they believe that it was most likely in 1996. And despite the president’s growing political profile, for years Ms. Carroll never raised the subject of her encounter with Mr. Trump.

Why speak up only now? If not when it happened, why not in 2016, when more than 10 other women came forward accusing Mr. Trump of sexual improprieties? Or when the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about assaulting women, was revealed?

Cande Carroll, 71, said that she, E. Jean, and their two other siblings — Tommy and Barbara — were in Indiana at their dying mother’s bedside the day the tape was disclosed. “We were all horrified,” the younger Ms. Carroll said. Her sister, though, said nothing about a personal story.

E. Jean Carroll said the “Access Hollywood” tape and the allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Trump did not compel her to speak about her own experience with him. If anything, said Ms. Carroll, who describes herself as a “gun-owning Democrat,” she figured the accusations made Mr. Trump appear strong in the eyes of his supporters. “I suspected it was helping,” she said.

On election night in 2016, Ms. Carroll was at Ms. Birnbach’s home watching the results. Ms. Carroll thought there was a moment when she and Ms. Birnbach shared a knowing look about Mr. Trump, but Ms. Birnbach did not recall it. In fact, she said, by that point she had forgotten what Ms. Carroll had told her.

The #MeToo Moment
As Ms. Carroll described it, the original idea for her book had nothing to do with Donald Trump. Rather, after years of listening to her readers’ concerns — most of them related to men — she had decided to take her dog on a trip around America and ask women the question: Do we really need men? The plan was to visit towns named after women, such as Cynthiana, Ind. — “it sounds like poetry!” she said — to eat in restaurants named for women, read books by women and listen to female artists in the car.

“I actually thought this was going to be a ‘Travels With Charley,’” Ms. Carroll said in an interview.

But then #MeToo happened. The news of allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke as she was driving through Pennsylvania in the fall of 2017. “I just kept pulling over to see the story,” she said. “And I couldn’t help but think of men in my own life.”

She also thought of the women she had advised over the years to buck up, to speak up, to go to the police or “move everything out when he’s at work.” “I felt like a fraud,” she said, because she had taken no such action herself. By the time she submitted her book proposal, in May 2018, she’d rethought it as part memoir, with the Trump allegation included. St. Martin’s Press paid a modest sum.

Ms. Carroll invited Ms. Birnbach and Ms. Martin to lunch last year and showed them the chapter depicting the encounter with Mr. Trump and the friends’ discussions about it. (Their names do not appear in the book.) In it, she wrote that she and Mr. Trump had recognized each other at Bergdorf’s, talked playfully about what gift he might buy for a woman, and ended up in the lingerie department, challenging each other to try on a lilac bodysuit. She remembered thinking it would make a great story.

But in the dressing room, with no one nearby, Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump pushed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and put his penis inside her. “It was violent, I fought, but didn’t think of it as …” she trailed off, never saying “rape.” “I have a hard time even saying that word,” she said.

She said she blamed herself for going into the dressing room with him. “What an idiot,” she said. “You don’t combine lingerie and going in a closed room.”

Sitting in Ms. Birnbach’s living room this week, the three reflected on the secret’s finally being out in the open.

As prominent journalists in New York in the 1990s, all three had at one point operated in overlapping circles with Mr. Trump, the real estate heir and tabloid news fixture with a messy personal life.

Ms. Carroll and Ms. Martin both had shows on America’s Talking, the cable channel run by Roger Ailes, and Ms. Martin said she had a brief exchange with Mr. Trump when he came in for an interview. She also had a friend who briefly dated him. Ms. Birnbach had interviewed Mr. Trump for an article about Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, in the months before she received that phone call from Ms. Carroll. And Ms. Carroll and her husband at the time had been photographed with Mr. Trump and his then-wife, Ivana Trump, at an NBC party in the late 1980s.

Ms. Carroll seems undaunted by the criticism and doubt that her accusations have unleashed. After taping an interview with CNN on Monday, Ms. Carroll went to a party in Brooklyn, where friends and former editors had gathered to toast her with a bottle of Chartreuse (her favorite) and a cake that read BRAVE. How was she? They wanted to know. Was she checking Twitter? Was she scared?

“I’m having a ball,” she replied.

She handed over a small box to the hostess — a gift to thank her for organizing the party. It was from Bergdorf’s.

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Reply #494 on: July 03, 2019, 12:45:46 PM
Teenager Accused of Rape Deserves Leniency Because He’s From a ‘Good Family,’ Judge Says

Quote
The 16-year-old girl was visibly intoxicated, her speech slurred, when a drunk 16-year-old boy sexually assaulted her in a dark basement during an alcohol-fueled pajama party in New Jersey, prosecutors said.

The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said. He later shared the cellphone video among friends, investigators said, and sent a text that said, “When your first time having sex was rape.”

But a family court judge said it wasn’t rape. Instead, he wondered aloud if it was sexual assault, defining rape as something reserved for an attack at gunpoint by strangers.

He also said the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle scout. Prosecutors, the judge said, should have explained to the girl and her family that pressing charges would destroy the boy’s life.

Now the judge has been sharply rebuked by an appeals court in a scathing 14-page ruling that warned the judge against showing bias toward privileged teenagers.

In doing so, the appeals court cleared the way for the case to be moved from family court to a grand jury, where the teenager, identified only as G.M.C. in court documents, will be treated as an adult. New Jersey law allows juveniles as young as 15 to be tried as adults when accused of serious crimes, and the grand jury will weigh whether to indict him on the sexual assault accusation.

In recent years, judges across the country have come under fire for the way they have handled sexual abuse cases. One of the most notorious was in 2016, when a judge in California sentenced a Stanford University student to six months in jail after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. After an intense public backlash, California voters recalled the judge.

Judge Troiano, who is roughly 70, was one of two family court judges whom appeals courts in New Jersey have criticized in recent weeks over relatively similar issues.

Editors’ Picks

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In the other case, the appellate division reversed another judge’s decision not to try a 16-year-old boy as an adult after he was accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in 2017.

The second family court judge, Marcia Silva, sitting in Middlesex County, denied a motion to try the teenager as an adult and said that “beyond losing her virginity, the State did not claim that the victim suffered any further injuries, either physical, mental or emotional.”

The appellate judges also upbraided Judge Silva, overturning her decision and noting that the teenager could be culpable because the 12-year-old was not old enough to provide consent in the first place.

The judge in Monmouth County, Mr. Troiano, was scolded by the appellate court, according to the panel’s decision. “That the juvenile came from a good family and had good test scores we assume would not condemn the juveniles who do not come from good families and do not have good test scores from withstanding waiver application,” the panel wrote in its decision.

A spokeswoman for the administrative office of the courts said the judges had no comment on the case. She said Mr. Troiano, a veteran judge who retired several years ago, was asked to occasionally fill vacancies on the bench.

Family court cases are typically closed to the public, but the judges’ comments surfaced in June when the appeals court decisions were made public, joining a series of contentious sexual assault cases that have ignited outrage over a legal system that advocates for victims say is warped by bias and privilege.

In the first case, heard by Judge Troiano, it is unclear from court documents when and specifically where in New Jersey the incident involving the two 16-year-olds took place.

But prosecutors said it occurred during a party packed with 30 other teenagers. The case was highlighted by a New Jersey radio station, 101.5.

The victim was identified only as Mary, an alias to protect her identity.

Before the episode, prosecutors said, both teenagers walked into a darkened area of the basement and Mary stumbled as she walked.

“While on the sofa, a group of boys sprayed Febreze on Mary’s bottom and slapped it with such force that the following day she had hand marks on her buttocks,” according to court documents.

After the assault, prosecutors said, G.M.C. left the room, but some of his concerned friends checked on her. Mary was found on the floor vomiting, and she was driven home by a friend’s mother.

When Mary woke up the following morning, she was confused about her torn clothing and bruises on her body, and told her mother she feared “sexual things had happened at the party” without her consent, court documents said.

Over the next several months, she learned that G.M.C. had shared the video among friends, but, when confronted, he denied recording the encounter and said the friends were lying, according to court documents.

Eventually, Mary learned that the boy had continued to share the video, prompting her mother to contact the authorities and ultimately pursue criminal charges in 2017.

In September 2017, the Monmouth County prosecutor’s office recommended that the case be tried in adult criminal court in part because the boy’s actions were “sophisticated and predatory.”

“At the time he led Mary into the basement gym, she was visibly intoxicated and unable to walk without stumbling,” the prosecutor wrote. “For the duration of the assault, the lights in the gym remained off and the door was barred by a foosball table. Filming a cellphone video while committing the assault was a deliberate act of debasement.”

The prosecutor said that the boy lied to Mary in the following months, while simultaneously sharing the video.

“This was neither a childish misinterpretation of the situation, nor was it a misunderstanding,” the prosecutor wrote. “G.M.C.’s behavior was calculated and cruel.”

In an interview, Christopher J. Gramiccioni, the county prosecutor said, “This is conduct that should be punished in adult court.”

“We subscribe to the idea that the juvenile system is supposed to be rehabilitative,” he said. “But when you’re dealing with charges as serious as these, it’s a whole different ball of wax.”

Mitchell J. Ansell, a lawyer for the teenage boy, did not return requests for comment.

Mr. Gramiccioni said New Jersey has a progressive juvenile system: Juvenile cases are not shown to juries, juvenile records are kept from public view and sentences are typically more lenient than when a person is tried as an adult.

A recent law made it illegal to try defendants younger than 15 as adults.

On July 30, 2018, Judge Troiano denied the waiver to try the teenager as an adult, arguing that prosecutors had abused their discretion.

Judge Troiano said there was a “distinction” between “a sexual assault and a rape.”

He said “the traditional case of rape” generally involved two or more males using a gun or weapon to corner a victim into an abandoned house, shed or shack, “and just simply taking advantage of the person as well as beating the person, threatening the person.”

It was under those egregious circumstances, he said, that the state would try a juvenile in adult court.

He delved into the facts of the case, questioning “whether or not this young lady was intoxicated to the point that she didn’t understand what was going on.”

He said the boy’s actions were not sophisticated or predatory, and dismissed G.M.C.’s text messages as “just a 16-year-old kid saying stupid crap to his friends.”

“This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well,” the judge said. “His scores for college entry were very high.”

The appellate decision criticized the judge, writing that rather than focusing on whether prosecutors met the necessary standards for a waiver, “the judge decided the case for himself.”

The judge overstepped in deconstructing the circumstances of the case, making his own assessment of the boy’s culpability and considering the defendant’s prior good character, the appellate panel said.

“His consideration of these elements, however, sounded as if he had conducted a bench trial on the charges rather than neutrally reviewed the State’s application,” the panel said.

In 2004, Judge Troiano imposed a gag order to prohibit people in a courtroom from discussing the high-profile case of two Montclair High School football players accused of sexually assaulting a schoolmate. The charges were eventually dropped.

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psiberzerker

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Reply #495 on: July 03, 2019, 06:30:20 PM
Pro-tip:  If there's any question whether it was rape?

Yes, it was.  There can be no doubt of Consent.  Without consent, clear, and emphatic, there's a word for that, and he used it, showing childporn to his friends.

No mention of that?  Okay, let's clear the charges of Rape, despite the excited utterance confession, in writing.

She's 16.  He recorded it, and distributed it to other kids, under age.  Just not going to bring up those statutes?  He's straight up guilty of production, possession, AND distribution of child pornography, by Federal statutes.  All 3 Felonies, they can call the FBI now.



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Reply #496 on: July 08, 2019, 08:43:09 PM



Offline Jed_

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Reply #497 on: July 08, 2019, 08:46:34 PM
Epstein?  Epstein?  Where do I know that name?

Oh yeah, 3rd one down.







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Reply #498 on: July 08, 2019, 10:30:34 PM
From 2015:

Can you guess the first name listed?

Here Is Pedophile Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book





Quote
Donald Trump, Courtney Love, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and uber-lawyer Alan Dershowitz may have been identified by a butler as potential "material witnesses" to pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's crimes against young girls, according to a copy of Epstein's little black book obtained by Gawker.

An annotated copy of the address book, which also contains entries for Alec Baldwin, Ralph Fiennes, Griffin Dunne, New York Post gossip Richard Johnson, Ted Kennedy, David Koch, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, and all manner of other people you might expect a billionaire to know, turned up in court proceedings after Epstein's former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez tried to sell it in 2009. About 50 of the entries, including those of many of Epstein's suspected victims and accomplices as well as Trump, Love, Barak, Dershowitz, and others, were circled by Rodriguez. (The existence of the book has been previously reported by the Daily Mail. Gawker is publishing it in full here for the first time; we have redacted addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and the last names of individuals who may have been underage victims.)

According to an FBI affidavit, Rodriguez described the address book and the information contained within it as the "Holy Grail" or "Golden Nugget" to unraveling Epstein's sprawling child-sex network. But despite having been subpoenaed for everything he had on his former boss, Rodriguez didn't share it with the FBI or Palm Beach Police Department detectives investigating Epstein. Instead, he tried to make a $50,000 score by covertly peddling the black book to one of the attorneys launching lawsuits at Epstein on behalf of his victims.

The plot backfired when the attorney reported Rodriguez to the FBI, and he was promptly charged with obstruction of justice. But not before he had, according to the FBI affidavit laying out the crime, marked up the book and an accompanying notepad with "handwritten notes" that contained "information material to the underlying investigation that would have been extremely useful in investigating and prosecuting the case, including the names and contact information of material witnesses and additional victims."

Rodriguez, who spent 18 months in prison, died in December after a long illness and never spoke out about the address book, so the precise significance of the names he circled remains fuzzy. But the FBI's case against him makes clear that Rodriguez regarded the address book as crucial to understanding Epstein's crimes; during a conversation with an undercover FBI agent posing as a potential buyer, he "discussed in detail the information contained in the book, and identified important information" to the agent.

In addition to the names above, as well as scores of apparent underage victims in Florida, New Mexico, California, Paris, and the United Kingdom listed under the rubric of "massage," the circled entries include:

Billionaire Leslie Wexner
Former New Mexico Governor Bruce King
Former New Mexico Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson
Peter Soros, the nephew of George Soros
Former Miss Sweden and socialite New York City doctor Eva Andersson Dubin
Some of the circled entries include additional notes—one address in New York City, for instance, is marked as an "apt. for models," and two names bear the marking "witness."

Asked why Rodriguez might have circled his name, Alan Dershowitz told Gawker, "I've never seen the book and I have no idea what it means. I was neither a victim nor a material witness—I never witnessed any crimes or participated in any crimes, and I can prove it."

Virginia Roberts, one of Epstein's alleged victims, has claimed in repeated court filings that Epstein instructed her to have sex with Dershowitz on several occasions, charges that Dershowitz categorically denies.

Trump, through a spokesperson, said, "Mr. Trump only knew Mr. Epstein as Mr. Trump owns the hottest and most luxurious club in Palm Beach, redacted, and Mr. Epstein would go there on occasion."

Although Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew have been mentioned in connection with Epstein's sordid deeds, their names aren't circled in the black book. But Epstein did have 21 contact numbers and various email addresses for Clinton, as well as several contact numbers for the prince.

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Reply #499 on: July 15, 2019, 02:29:15 AM
‘I accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. Now I sleep with a loaded gun’

Quote
Miss Bingley greets you in the driveway to the house in upstate New York, surrounded by a tangle of knotted woodland. The Toyota Prius, named after the spiteful Caroline Bingley in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, is an appropriate place to start – because without the car there would have been no road trip and without the road trip there would have been no reckoning with a list of hideous men, and without that reckoning Miss Bingley’s owner would not today find herself at the centre of an almighty storm involving the most powerful person on Earth.

E Jean Carroll’s cabin in the woods is small – 600 sq ft, she keeps reminding me – and engulfed in trees, which the New York media fixture and Elle magazine agony aunt has allowed to grow right up to the windowsills. “Welcome to the Mouse House” has been handpainted on the front of the cabin – a reference to the mice frequently dragged in by Carroll’s cat, which goes by the name of Vagina T Fireballs.

Inside, the turquoise walls are hung with fading photographs of Carroll, in her prom dress and with her pet goat, Pan, as well as deer skulls and yards of bookshelves – her collection includes six volumes of Jane Austen and a library of PG Wodehouse. The chimney stones are painted in blues, greens and yellows, and above the hearth is another handpainted motto: “Always aroused, never angry – Thackeray.”

Carroll meets me with a generous smile. She is as elegant and tidy as her home is dishevelled, with blond hair cut short, 60s-style, and dressed in a pink tweed jacket, riding breeches and boots. She gives me a tour and I’m tempted to stop her every few feet to ask, “Why?” Why is the phrase “Burn, baby, burn” scrawled on the door of the microwave? Why are there six sunhats hanging above the kitchen sink? (“It’s a tiny house, 600 sq ft,” she replies. “Where else would you put them?”) More importantly, why is there a gun on her bedside table?

“It’s loaded,” Carroll says. She picks up the revolver, which has a fake pearl handle, and waves it around. “I’ve always had a gun,” she says. “When I’m doing Skype calls with my friends, I like to pull it out. But I’ve never had it loaded. Not until now.”

A loaded gun by the bed is one of the prices you pay if you are a woman who has just accused the president of the United States of raping you. Three weeks ago, in an excerpt from her new book What Do We Need Men For?, published in New York magazine, Carroll added her name to the growing number of women (which now stands at 16) who allege that they have been groped, forcibly kissed or worse by the current occupant of the Oval Office. Carroll went further in her allegations than almost everyone before her. She said she ran into Donald Trump, whom she had met a few years previously, in Bergdorf Goodman, the Manhattan department store; it was late 1995 or early 1996, and she was 52. They got to bantering about what gift Trump should buy a female friend. Lingerie was mentioned. He picked up a see-through bodysuit and told her to put it on. She fired back: “You try it on.” Together they entered a dressing room. She was laughing, thinking it all a great hoot. But not for long.

Carroll alleges that Trump lunged at her, slamming her head and pinning her against the wall with his body as he penetrated her against her will. She prefers not to use the word rape, but agrees her description does meet the legal definition of the crime – something that has only once before been alleged against Trump: by his first wife, Ivana, in a divorce deposition; she later said she did not mean rape “in a literal or criminal sense”.

In What Do We Need Men For?, Carroll writes that she always knew Trump would deny it – and this is precisely what he has done, repeatedly and in his Trumpian way. He doesn’t know Carroll and never has, he told reporters, despite a photograph of the two of them and their then spouses talking happily at an NBC party, in about 1987. Trump also said Carroll was “not my type”. “It was so dumb,” she says. “It just laid it out in black and white: ‘When I rape a woman, I don’t rape a 52-year-old in Bergdorf. I rape a blond 28-year-old.’ That’s basically what he said.”

But if she fully anticipated the president’s denials, she was less prepared for the commotion that followed, and other people’s reactions. Since her story broke, she has received several death threats on social media and now stays offline to avoid the bile. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has been muted in its response. The initial reaction from the major US newspaper and television outlets was close to a shrug, as though this were just another item to add to the slush pile of Trump allegations. The New York Times relegated the story to its book pages. When I went to buy a copy of the book on its launch day, in a flagship New York branch of Barnes & Noble, it had been placed in a corner of the fourth floor in the women’s studies section. Shouldn’t a book containing fresh allegations about a serious sex attack by a sitting US president be near the entrance, for everyone to read?

I tell Carroll and she is livid. “Oh! That says more than anything I’ve heard. The fourth floor women’s studies section. You want to know how to bury a book? That’s how you do it.” There are no plans to publish the book in the UK.

But after a lukewarm start, several TV channels and print outlets are pursuing her allegations. In hindsight, Carroll says, she didn’t fully anticipate the impact of a rape allegation against the president, compared with the accusations that preceded hers. “We didn’t weigh them or see it coming. I just wrote 11 pages about Trump. We don’t even mention him on the cover of the book. I thought there might be a little brouhaha, but that was it. I didn’t think it through.”

She has thought it through now, though. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “You saw what’s beside my bed.”

We move outside to a table that looks like something from Miss Havisham’s garden, gently rotting under a lush covering of moss that resembles a velvet tablecloth. She serves tea in cups without saucers (“Don’t tell the Queen!”) and a plate of sliced tomatoes and cheese, chunks of which she periodically dispenses to her newly adopted rescue dog, Guffington von Fluke.

Carroll tells me What Do We Need Men For? had been brewing in her mind for 26 years – ever since she began her Ask E Jean advice column in Elle magazine, at the age of 50. The column has a devoted fanbase of women drawn to her tart, funny, to-the-point writing. Sample advice to a correspondent who complains that her husband refuses to wash: “Soak him down with the garden hose, tie him to the shower rod with Hermès scarves.”

The column sent her on a particular path. “Very early on, I realised that men were causing almost every problem sent in: the financial problems, the love-affair problems, the problems at work. I also noticed that I was repeatedly telling my correspondents to ‘get rid of him’.”

She decided to take a road trip that would allow her to test her hypothesis that men are more trouble than they are worth. As she writes in her new prologue: “The whole female sex seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance with their lying, cheating, robbing, perjuring, assaulting, murdering.” She has been twice married and twice divorced herself, first to Stephen Byers, with whom she lived in Montana before her journalism career took off; then, in the 80s, to former TV anchor John Johnson. She now lives in the Mouse House alone, but is close to her neighbours, with deep ties to New York medialand, and a life seemingly overflowing with friends.

Her plan in 2017 was to drive through the heartlands of America, stopping only at towns named after women – Elnora, Indiana; Bonnieville, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi – and asking local women what, if anything, they needed men for. She was attracted to the idea of subverting a testosterone-fuelled literary genre (think Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, or Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and turning it into a treatise on the dispensability of men.

Carroll has a track record in subversion that dates back to her childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She inherited her eccentricity from her father, an inventor whose proudest creations were disposable galoshes and goggles to protect the eyes from TV rays. “I spent my childhood watching TV through Dad’s goggles,” she says. Her mother was a local politician and Republican campaigner. It was magazines, not books, that satisfied her young lust for reading – Austen and Wodehouse would have to wait. She got the itch to write, working freelance for years with scant success, until she got a piece accepted by Esquire at the age of 36. From there, she quickly developed a reputation, working for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and other heavyweight glossies. She moved to New York in the early 80s, a time when being a magazine writer was the pinnacle of cool.

“Those were the days!” she says. “It was everything: you’re running through the avenues at 4am, having a ball. I had no money, didn’t know anybody, two outfits and a pair of cowgirl boots, and I just loved it. Living!”

Carroll began to frequent the writers’ table at Elaine’s restaurant, the now defunct Upper East Side media hangout. This was a man’s world and she was the only woman at the table. She became close to the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, going on to write his biography. The Elle column led to a TV show, and a stint writing for Saturday Night Live in 1986. Carroll says she was a historically bad SNL writer, which fails to explain her Emmy nomination. “I shone for one brief moment,” she concedes. “I wrote a sketch for [comedian] Sam Kinison about him getting dressed for a date and falling in love with himself in the mirror.”

There it was, even then: a forensic ability to precision-bomb men at their most abject. She further mined that theme with a book, The Loves Of My Life, in which she tracked down former boyfriends and moved in with them and their wives. “Oh God, I got on the wives’ nerves,” she recalls.

The road trip that became What Do We Need Men For? began on 6 October 2017, nine months into Trump’s presidency. By chance, hours earlier, one of the triggers of the #MeToo movement was pulled: the New York Times published the first major allegations of sexual misconduct against film producer Harvey Weinstein.

It was a moment that changed her life, Carroll says. “I had barely come out of the driveway and it hit. I kept pulling over to read Twitter – I couldn’t believe it.” In the days that followed, the tone of the letters sent to her advice column changed. “I got way more questions about, ‘Should I turn my husband in to the police?’ Or, ‘Shall I report my boss?’ I started advising women: keep a log, get him on tape, go to the state.”

As #MeToo gathered pace, Carroll says it became clear that she could no longer sit on the sidelines, dishing out advice while failing to confront her own demons. She sat down to write what she calls “the most hideous men of my life list”. She was stunned by what gushed up from her past. “It hadn’t occurred to me that I had this unusual life. Any woman who starts making a list like this is going to think, ‘What the hell!’ Particularly women of my age, who were working in the 60s and 70s. There were so many! I was horrified.”

She whittled the list down to 21 men, not all of whom directly hurt her. Roger Ailes, the late disgraced chairman of Fox News, was a dear friend but is included because of what he did to other women.

(As an aside, Carroll follows UK politics and says that were she ever to meet Boris Johnson, Britain’s likely next prime minister, she would make him hideous man #22, given his track record of cheating on his wives.)

Carroll says her own experience of abuse started very young. She thinks she must have been three when the babysitter’s boyfriend pulled off her pyjama bottoms at bedtime and “fondled my guinea”. In her freshman year at university in Indiana, aged 17, she was held down at knifepoint by another student but managed to escape. In later life, she alleges that Les Moonves, the disgraced former head of CBS news, went at her in an elevator “like an octopus” after she interviewed him for Esquire. His representative “emphatically denied” the incident to New York magazine. Number 20 on that list is Donald Trump. It took considerable guts for her to include him. In 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape emerged of the Republican nominee bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, she bided her time. Several other women came forward to allege sexual misconduct. “I watched the women closely. I noticed they were flanked by attorneys and that they were sober and sad. Many of them cried, for very good reasons.”

She decided not to join their ranks. “Why would I put my reputation on the line? I saw them dragged through the mud.”

But after the floodgates of #MeToo opened, she felt increasingly uncomfortable. “I started to think I was the biggest fraud that walks – I’m telling my correspondents what to do but haven’t opened my own lips about anything, ever.”

She decided to include the president, but told almost no one. When New York magazine published her story three weeks ago, her family and most of her friends were stunned. She had confided in only two close friends, fellow New Yorkers both of whom are anonymous in her book but have since outed themselves, TV anchor Carol Martin and writer Lisa Birnbach. They have corroborated parts of Carroll’s story, confirming that she called them soon after Trump’s alleged assault and gave a fevered account of what had happened. The duo gave Carroll conflicting advice. Birnbach thought that what Carroll had described was clearly rape, and that she should go straight to the police. Martin said: “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” We know whose counsel she followed.

After so many years, how does that day replay in her mind; how clear is her memory? Carroll says her experience conforms closely to that of Christine Blasey Ford, who last year testified that the now supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. Some of the details were blurry, but the key facts were seared into her memory in perpetuity, the psychology professor told Congress.

That chimes with Carroll. “I have a crystal clear memory of most of it. A lot of it is etched into my brain.”

Could there have been any doubt, any confusion, that it was Trump? She looks at me with an expression that is part bafflement, part disgust, accompanied by a sound like the snort of a horse. “No. Donald Trump was the one and only. He knew everybody. He greeted everybody in the streets. He was charming. Recognising him was a big deal for me.” So zero doubt? “Zero. ZERO.”

I ask Carroll whether she remembers particular physical sensations. In the book, she captures the brief minutes of the alleged attack in vivid detail, writing about becoming “aware of how large he is”.

“I felt his shoulder against me,” she says now. “That was the weight I felt. He was big, and he had one of his topcoats on, so he had that against me, too. I remember the feeling of being pressed by his shoulder, my head bouncing against the wall. That is clear. It was so surprising.”

Has she resisted calling it rape because she has conflicting feelings about the alleged attack? “The flirtation is great, I’ll always do that,” she says. “But going in the room – that was where I screwed up.”

She blames herself for that? “Oh yeah. If I hadn’t gone into the dressing room, it wouldn’t have happened. You and I wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”

I want to be sure of what she’s saying to me. A woman can go into a dressing room with a man and then walk out at will, I say. “No. No. I don’t think a woman will ever be able to walk into a small enclosure with a man like that. Ever, ever, ever. I don’t care if they infused every man’s brain with #MeToo, you won’t be safe. It’s like you won’t be safe shooting up heroin, you won’t be safe driving at 120 miles per hour with the lights out.”

But rape is the man’s responsibility. “No. It’s the responsibility of the woman, too. It’s equal. Men can’t control themselves.”

Carroll knows that what she is saying is contentious, and that a younger generation hold little truck with the idea of female complicity in sexual assault. But she is unapologetic, as she is about her choice to avoid the word “rape” when it comes to Trump. She is convinced that rape is seen by many people – men and women – as “sexy”, and that by using it we are playing Trump’s game. “It’s a fantasy. ‘Rape’ is very sexual and I just hate it. If a woman is raped and wants to report it to police, they should be free to use the word, that’s their choice. But I’ve always feared that Trump can be helped by these stories.”

How so? She points out that, unlike Weinstein, who is awaiting trial, or Les Moonves, who resigned from CBS, or Bill Cosby, who is behind bars, Trump has emerged from a plethora of allegations apparently unscathed. “I can’t explain that,” she says. “Except that we seem to want it in our leaders. We wanted it in Kennedy, in Clinton. We crave powerful male leaders who grab what they desire without asking.”

For Carroll, the most upsetting part of the alleged assault is political: it is a metaphor for what Trump is doing to America. “What he did to me is what he’s doing to the country. He’s taking what he wants. And nobody is stopping him. Not his party, not the Democrats. Nobody is impeaching him, nobody is doing anything. Aren’t you amazed?”

I tell her I am. But I also wonder whether there’s an element of denial in the way that Carroll pushes any trauma away from herself and on to history. There’s one line in the book that is stark and startling, and comes just after she describes kneeing Trump away from her and fleeing. She writes: “I’ve never had sex with anybody ever again.”

I read that sentence to her. Again, she demurs. “It’s just a fact. I think it’s because of my age, and that I haven’t been lucky enough to meet somebody.”

But she wrote that line clearly implying that her celibacy was connected to Trump. She stops and thinks. “You make your own luck, it’s true. I wasn’t bold enough to say, yes, it was because of him.” So will she say it now, in this wooded idyll where she is safe? “I think it’s half-and-half. I haven’t met the guy, but meeting the guy is about being open to it.”

She is in reflective mode now, and I wonder if I have stirred up too many painful contradictions. But you can’t get E Jean Carroll down for long. She starts to tell me about the enormous sackloads of correspondence she has received. “The mail bag is huge. Women are telling their stories again. That tells me we are not going to shut up. We will not be silenced by hideous men. We are going to tell our stories until change comes..”

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