TW/CW: Graphic depictions of sexual, emotional, and verbal violence.

UPDATE: Yesterday, January 30, 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York signed the “Rape Is Rape” Law, nicknamed as such because currently, New York’s legal code defines rape only as non-consensual vaginal penetration by a penis. Many forms of what are commonly considered rape in our society have instead fallen under New York’s legal category of sexual abuse. This was highlighted in the recent civil actions filed by writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll against former President Trump; a jury awarded Ms. Carroll a $5 million judgment against Mr. Trump in 2023 for sexual abuse and defamation, and a second jury awarded Ms. Carroll an $83 million judgment against Mr. Trump last week for further defamation. What Ms. Carroll claimed, and what the jury believed based on the superiority of the evidence, was that Mr. Trump penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his finger in an incident in the 1990s. It could only legally be called sexual abuse in New York until now. But beginning September 1 of this year, what Mr. Trump did – along with many other forms of sexual violence we usually call rape – will be legally known as rape in that state.

This is something activists working on stopping sexual violence in our society have pursued for years. (Before I came back to teaching in 2019, I worked for several years in the field of relationship and sexual violence prevention education, and I hold a state certification as a sexual assault victim advocate.) One reason this is important is that the term sexual abuse encompasses a huge range of violent behaviors, all of which are immoral and illegal. Yet some defenders of sexually violent perpetrators have used the breadth of that term to persuade the public that what they did wasn’t that bad. This was true of Mr. Trump’s legal team, which tried to push the idea that sexual abuse in the incident between Ms. Carroll and him may have been something less egregious, like the unwanted grabbing of a woman’s clothed breasts. (The idea that such a violent act is “not as bad” is quite a perversion of sexuality as God created and ordained it.) This prompted the judge in the case to issue a statement explaining that the judgment was one of rape by digital (finger) penetration, even though it did not fall under New York’s legal definition of rape.

Ultimately, all of this is not about politics. This new law and the jury verdicts in favor of Ms. Carroll speak to the morality of our country and communities. Is American morality going down the toilet? Not based on these developments, which are hopeful signs that there may be more righteousness among us than we thought.

And now, back to my post as published last week:

I still believe, with all my heart, that there is no greater crisis confronting our society than relationship and sexual violence. Even though I concluded my years of occupational work on that issue several years ago, returning to teaching mathematics to middle schoolers and high schoolers, my feelings haven’t changed – relationship and sexual violence is so common, so widespread, and so damaging that there is nothing more important in our communities and our nation than making that evil behavior a thing of the past.

That’s the main reason to praise a jury’s decision to punish former President Trump by fining him over $80 million for legally defaming journalist and author E. Jean Carroll, following a separate jury’s $5 million verdict last year that he was responsible for raping her digitally – that is, by penetrating her with his finger – in a department store back in the 1990s and defaming her at another time. It wasn’t just that Mr. Trump was causing significant personal and financial harm to Ms. Carroll with his public statements to the world, and provoking his supporters to flood her with incessant death threats on top of that. His words fundamentally accused her of lying about what he did to her.

And that’s the most important thing to come out of this – that a man who has done terrible things to a woman does not have the right, after being found responsible in court for raping her, to publicly gaslight her and shower her with victim-blaming in order to preserve his reputation. Let me say that again – a man who has been found responsible by a jury for violently attacking a woman does not get to go back out into society and demean her to save his reputation. Powerful men who have committed evil acts of interpersonal violence are known for this kind of behavior – take advantage of someone, get caught, and then use their position and privilege to trash their victims, thus punishing them in the court of public opinion and restoring their own standing. Instead, the jury’s verdict today puts violent men on notice: You’re going to own this. Or, to quote St. Paul in his biblical letter to the Galatian churches, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked. For whatever a person sows, this he will also reap” (Galatians 6.7 NASB).

But, Mr. Trump’s supporters say, this was a civil court and not a criminal court, where the evidentiary standard is higher, so we must give him the benefit of the doubt – after all, he’s “innocent until proven guilty.” It’s true that civil courts rule on the “preponderance of the evidence” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but using that line to defend him is similar to saying, “O.J. Simpson was found liable for the deaths of two people in civil court, but he was acquitted in criminal court, so we have to assume that he didn’t do anything wrong.” That defies all common sense.

And again, Mr. Trump has been accused credibly by around two dozen women of sexual violence in one form or another. It’s not as many as Harvey Weinstein (around 80 accusers) and Bill Cosby (around 60), but do we really need that many to let go of the “benefit of the doubt”? (And from my experience in sexual violence prevention work, it’s almost always true that there are more victims than we will ever know.)

I’ll reiterate that this is not mainly about politics, though it is related to that. This verdict is about holding powerful people accountable for verbally and emotionally abusing people after victimizing them physically and/or sexually. It should send a message to other abusive, predatory narcissists that they can’t get away with that, and that our society’s moral code will defend the vulnerable.

One last thing before my 2023 update of my 2017 post. As I’ve sifted through news stories over the last year about women who have come forward since my original post, recalling Mr. Trump’s sexual misconduct toward them prior to 2017, I believe that a more appropriate title would now be “To the Brave 26 Women Who Told Us What Trump Did to Them.”

What follows next is my first update of the 2017 piece, “To the Brave 22 Women Who Told Us What Trump Did to Them.” It appeared in this blog in 2023:

I first posted this piece back in January of 2017, the same month Donald John Trump was sworn into office as the 45th President of the United States. Since then, the number of his accusers has grown beyond the number noted in the title above.

One of the women who came forward to tell her story in more recent years is journalist and author E. Jean Carroll, who just won a legal victory against Trump in a New York civil court. A three-woman, six-man jury found unanimously that the former president is liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll back in the 1990s and for defaming her when she told her story publicly a few years ago. So confident was this jury in its decision that it awarded a $5 million judgment that Trump must pay her.

I am happy for Ms. Carroll and for the many other women who have suffered for years from the trauma that Trump inflicted upon them. They won’t get the justice they deserve, at least not in this lifetime. But I hope they experience a small measure of healing from this verdict, though Trump will likely appeal.

These are courageous women, some of whom I have gotten to know through my past work in the field of sexual violence prevention. They are neither political agents, fame seekers, nor gold diggers. They have endured death threats and rape threats, threats against their families, getting blacklisted for jobs, and having their reputations smeared with lies for telling their stories, and they knew they would. I repost my piece in their honor:

To the brave women who came forward with the truth of what Trump did to you:

I can only imagine what it’s been like for you these last several months. You had kept to yourself, or to just a few confidants, the story of what he did to you years ago. You handled the intense, lingering pain, confusion, and feelings of shame, each in your own way. Many of you probably thought you’d never need to talk about it ever again.

And then the world heard from the man, in his own words and voice, that he couldn’t help kissing women, that he enjoyed grabbing the most private areas of their bodies, and that because of his star power, they would let him.

And then the world heard more recordings:

• In one, he allowed another man to wonder out loud whether his daughter had breast implants.
• In another, he explicitly gave permission to the same man to call his daughter a “piece of ass.”
• In a third, he boasted of getting away with deliberately walking in on contestants in his beauty pageants while they were naked.

And we heard his denials. It was just “locker room talk,” he said. Just stuff he said, but didn’t do.

Then, one by one, you began to bravely tell your stories of what he had done to you. You did so publicly, knowing what people would say.

They’d accuse you of making it up. They’d say the fact you waited until right before the election meant you were lying.

Not understanding the psychological effects of sexual harassment and assault, they would insist your story had to be fake because of something you said or did afterward. They’d accuse you of conspiring to get Hillary Clinton elected, or that you were doing it for attention, money, fame, or all of the above.

And you were right, they did say those things. Some, for good measure, also called you bitches, whores, sluts, cunts, and pussies.

Some said they would rape you.

Some even said they would kill you.

Most, perhaps even all, of these reactions were not a surprise to you, especially in this day and age.

His denials went into an even higher gear. “Totally and absolutely false … fabricated … outright lies,” he said.

He blamed Clinton. He blamed the media.

He even called himself a victim.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, near the hallowed ground on which thousands of soldiers died for the values Americans hold dear, he promised, “All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”

You never really wanted anyone additional to know about one of the most painful parts of your life, much less, literally, millions of strangers. But you felt like you had to tell your story. The stakes were too high. The country had to know the truth – that the nation was about to make a sexual predator the most powerful person on the planet.

But after a few days, people rallied to him, proclaiming their belief that he was the one telling the truth. Politicians, pundits, and prominent male evangelicals declared their disgust with his recorded comments but made clear they believed nothing else happened.

Without saying it explicitly, they called you liars, too.

Then on Election Day, he won, and hasn’t looked back.

Nor have his closest supporters, like his own Vice President-elect, who told multiple national networks on the morning of Friday, October 14, that by day’s end, there would be proof that all of you were lying.

As of the date of this blog post, 90 days have passed. We’re still waiting for that proof. And those lawsuits, for that matter.

Of course, we know that proof doesn’t exist. And that he was bluffing about those lawsuits, each of which would either expose his serial abuse in greater detail or would cause him to perjure himself.

It shouldn’t take so many of you coming forward for Americans to believe you. False accusations of sexual assault are no more common statistically than any other major crime; research consistently shows that 92 to 98 percent of accusations are true. But the fact that so many of you have bravely told your stories gives the rest of us no excuse not to believe you. Like with Bill Cosby’s accusers, there is not only strength in numbers, there is no longer even a shadow of a doubt.

I do not know how or when the great injustices that have been done to you – the sexual violations, the years of pain, the retraumatization through public smears and vile threats – will be made right. I have faith that they one day will. Yet in the meantime, please know that you, and what you have been through, have not been forgotten as the political process and news coverage have moved on. Many millions of us believe you, the 22 that have spoken.

Temple, Jessica L., Rachel, Natasha, Mindy, Cassandra, Jill, Nancy, Kristin, Summer, Cathy, Karena, Ninni, Tasha and the other 2001 Miss USA contestant, Bridget, Jessica D., Mariah and Victoria and the three other 1997 Miss Teen USA contestants, we see you. We stand with you and with the others whose stories we have heard, but who have declined to speak publicly at this time.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for speaking out. Your courage inspires ours as we rededicate ourselves to holding him and all abusers accountable, and to stopping violence against women and girls in every community, all over the world.