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Elizabeth Williams

E. Jean Carroll used to have a career, now she has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>. She used to have prestige, now she has Donald Trump. She used to have an identity, and then in 2019 she accused the former president of sexually assaulting her in a 1996 dressing room, and now her identity is the woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room.

This became clear, painfully so, in a several exchanges at the trial this week in which Carroll is suing Donald Trump for defaming her by saying she was “totally lying.” (A jury also sided with Carroll in a similar trial last year, finding that Trump had sexually abused her and then defamed her when he called her accusations a “hoax” and a “lie.”)

Carroll, a respected 80-year-old writer, first named Trump as her attacker in a book, “What Do We Need Men For?” — a sweeping travelogue and memoir in which Trump’s presence is minimal. On Wednesday, Carroll’s attorney asked her whether she’d tried to promote her book. Yes, Carroll replied. She had gone on podcasts and television shows. On those shows, she said, interviewers only want to hear about Donald Trump.

Carroll, whose body of work includes a biography of Hunter S. Thompson, multiple other books and a long stint as a beloved advice columnist for Elle magazine, was asked whether she still wrote freelance articles. She replied that now the assignments were all about Donald Trump, “nothing else.”

She said that now, when she attempts to use X (formerly Twitter) — a social network that was once personally enjoyable and professionally necessary — she posts “dog videos and Christmas messages,” and in reply she hears from Trump supporters calling her a liar. And then there’s the scary stuff: death threats that Carroll says caused her to buy bullets for her dad’s old gun.

A common accusation against sexual assault victims who go public with their stories is that they must be seeking attention. Trump lawyer Alina Habba floated a similar theory about Carroll on Tuesday, saying she “is now more famous than she has ever been in her life and loved and respected by many, which was her goal.” But who would possibly want this kind of fame? This was a woman in the upper echelons of her profession whose accusations meant exchanging a version of fame that was about <i>her</i> for a version of fame that was about<i> him</i>. “I spent 50 years building a reputation,” Carroll said in court. “Now I’m known as a liar, a fraud, and a whack job.”

Reading accounts of Carroll’s testimony, the most notable part to me is the relentlessness of Trump’s presence in her life. The inescapability, the stealing of her oxygen. Trump has not even testified yet, but his harrumphing antics from the defense table have already captured most of the headlines: Carroll’s lawyer complained that Trump could be heard in court loudly telling his lawyers that the trial was “a witch hunt.” The judge rebuked Trump, who later called the judge “nasty.”

The same week that Carroll’s trial began, presidential candidate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/nikki-haley-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Nikki Haley</a> announced she would not participate in any more debates unless Donald Trump finally joined them too — and, yes, it bears strenuously repeating that the man whom a jury found liable for sexual abuse, the man bellowing “witch hunt” at his defamation trial, is the same man who will almost certainly become his party’s nominee for president.

You can’t blame Haley. What is the point in miking up again to snipe with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/ron-desantis-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Ron DeSantis</a> for second place? But her decision ends up giving Donald Trump exactly what he seems to crave: the removal of oxygen from any room in which he is not present. The implication that rooms in which he is not present need not exist. The implication that his room is the only room, his show is the only show.

“Nikki came in a distant THIRD!” the former president rambled on Truth Social. “She said she would never run against me, ‘he was a great President,’ and she should have followed her own advice. Now she’s stuck with WEAK POLICIES, and a VERY STRONG MAGA BASE, and there’s just nothing she can do!”

Following the E. Jean Carroll trial feels like watching one 80-year-old woman realize there is just nothing she can do to rid herself of this omnipresence, and then realizing that we are, all of us, that 80-year-old woman. That we have been, for some time, subsumed and consumed by one man and his very strong MAGA base. In the future when sociologists and historians study this period of time, I wonder if this will be the most lasting psychological stain. Not any specific acts, but the general weight, the inescapable pull, the black hole, the fog, the fug, the reality that our atmosphere is coated in a thin, smoggy layer of Donald Trump.

We used to have debates. We used to have a normal political system. Now we have only the memory of who we were before he became a main character in our story.

Society for Features Journalism, first place, Narrative Storytelling, 2017 

Livingston Award, finalist in Local Reporting, 2015 

Washington Post Publishers Award, 2014

Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest, winner, 2014.

Society for Features Journalism, third place, General Feature, 2014

James Beard Award, finalist in Humor, 2014

GLAAD Media Awards, finalist, Outstanding Newspaper Article, 2010

Edgar Allan Poe Award presented by Mystery Writers of America, winner, Best Young-Adult Mystery, 2016

Indies Choice Book Awards, finalist, Young Adult Book of the Year, 2016 

Pulitzer Prize finalist, Commentary, 2022

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Bryn Mawr College, B.A. in English

Johns Hopkins University, M.A. in Nonfiction writing

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post's Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. In 2022 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She's the author of several novels, most recently, "They Went Left."

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