June 22, 2019
Notes from a 1990s Bergdorf shopaholic: The E. Jean Carroll story about Trump doesn't add up
By Monica Showalter
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll is selling a book of her steamy sexual misadventures and sure enough, there's a story about how Donald Trump, circa 1995 or 1996, raped the writer in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York, a pretty extreme charge buried under a big pile of stories about men who supposedly exploited her, seemingly with her clumsy assent. The Trump administration has denied the whole thing as "completely false."
I find it hard to believe. Carroll does name a long string of men who exploited her one way or another, and some of them are #metoo poster boys, such as Les Moonves, for whom it's easy to be believed about a groping in an elevator, which may well have happened. The earlier charges against Moonves were fairly substantiated. But Trump's been accused of sexual misbehavior, too, often just bad talk, not acts, and there's never been any substantiation. That also makes him an easy target of accusations for the purpose of piling on and selling books as well. Trump himself points out that she is out to sell a book, which might explain why she never made the charges even in the heat of the election back when everyone was trying to take him down or the bitter aftermath.
Carroll describes Trump as all handsome and confident in her 1996 Bergdorf's encounter. That's pretty questionable, actually. Trump was a billionaire on the outs at the time. He was bankrupt, and far from looking all handsome as she described, he looked shambling and seedy in 1996, according to this account of a 1996 encounter with Trump by far more credible writer Mark Bowden. Trump was having money troubles. Would someone like that have gone all criminally violent with some woman he didn't know to add to his legal troubles? I find it hard to believe - he wasn't bulletproof financially at the time. And would Carroll have been the woman he would choose? He was buying beauty contests at the time. The women he was interested in then were young models and beauty queens. Carroll is a nice-looking woman - this photo below shows her about a decade older than she would have been for the encounter with Trump, but she's not beauty contest material at that age. She looks like a wealthy housewife. Would Carroll have been the woman Trump would have found irresistable? Color me a little skeptical. I know a woman that Trump flirted with in 1996 who was quite a bit younger. She sent me emails about it because she was disgusted that he was married, but all the same, he never went beyond flirting; flirtaciousness was actually his limit for those not giving him any encouragement.
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