A week ago, it would have seemed wildly unlikely to most people that Donald J. Trump, not Hillary Clinton, would be the candidate more likely to provoke a culture-wide shift in how we think of and talk about sexual assault. But since the release on Friday of a recording in which Trump essentially admits he has a habit of sexually assaulting women, a series of stories involving the Republican nominee seems to be doing just that.
Consider the story of the former People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff, whom Trump reportedly pushed up against a wall and kissed in 2005.
Stoynoff chose to move on with her life rather than speak publicly about what she says Trump did to her. Even as a media-savvy working woman, she writes that she still partly blamed herself for the assault well into this year, believing that at some level, she had surely somehow encouraged it.
She could not shake the idea of her own culpability until the moment she heard Trump on tape saying he did this kind of thing as a matter of course. “I finally understood for sure that I was not to blame for his inappropriate behavior,” she wrote.
Her choices and her thinking, all those years before she told her story — they sound familiar. Surely many women her age and older would still respond to those circumstances the way she did, with silence and shame. Certainly, Jessica Leeds, who spoke to The New York Times about an encounter in which she said Trump groped her on a plane, came of age at a time when women were taught, as she put it, “it was our fault.” Trump’s own camp seems to be working hard to perpetuate the kind of thinking that blames the woman: Eric Trump said in August that a “strong, powerful woman” like his sister Ivanka wouldn’t allow sexual harassment to happen to her.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/after-donald-trump-will-more-women-believe-their-own-stories.html
