Trump has been accused of sexual assault again. It matters.
The media and the public should treat the issue seriously.
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Yet another woman has accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her. On a Zoom call for Survivors for Kamala, former model Stacey Williams, 56, said that Trump groped her at a party while billionaire sex trafficker and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein stood by.
Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least eighteen women. Last year a jury found him liable for the sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll. The judge in the case characterized the the assault as a rape.
Everybody who wants to know, then, already knows that Trump has a history of sexually harassing and abusing women. Nonetheless, polls show him with about a 50 percent chance of winning the election.
It’s easy to be cynical about the possible effect of new accusations. Trump’s fans don’t care that he’s an abuser. If new revelations were going to affect the election, they would have already done so, the argument goes. Nothing matters.
The problem with the immediate assumption that something won’t matter, though, is that it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It gives the media an excuse to dismiss and ignore Trump’s scandals and Trump’s vileness. And in this case, it’s also insulting to survivors, who put themselves at substantial risk when they come forward to defy one of the most powerful men in the world.
Rather than insisting preemptively that testimony about Trump’s unfitness doesn’t matter, we need to take it seriously — and insist that the media and voters take it seriously too.
Years of allegations
Williams says she met Trump through Jeffrey Epstein, who she dated briefly in the early ‘90s. Epstein took Williams to visit Trump at Trump Tower. Shortly after they arrived, she said as her voice shook, Trump groped her.
“He pulled me into him and started groping me,” she said. “He put his hands all over my breasts, my waist, my butt.”
Williams’s accusations are in line with other accusations against Trump going back decades. Numerous women have said that Trump groped them or assaulted them.
As just two examples: photographer and former model Kristin Anderson said that Trump reached under the skirt at a nightclub in the early ‘90s. And Summer Zervos, a contestant on Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice”, says Trump kissed her and groped her on two occasions in 2007.
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There is also an accusation against Trump that has been adjudicated. Writer E. Jean Carroll said that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in late 1995 or 1996; he held her down, kissed her, and penetrated her with his fingers while she tried to fight him off. Carroll sued Trump, and a jury concluded that he was liable for the assault. They awarded her $5 million for the assault.
In a separate action, Carroll sued Trump for defamation for smearing her when she went public with the accusations; the jury in that case awarded her $83 million.
Epstein and Trump, longtime friends
Williams’s accusation is also a reminder that Trump and Epstein were longtime associates — and it for the first time suggests that the two may have collaborated in sexual harassment or violence.
Trump and Epstein were friends for some twenty years starting in the late ‘80s. They were neighbors in Florida, and would travel back and forth from there to New York. They ate and partied together at each other’s properties.
During this time, according to his accusers, Trump was regularly groping and assaulting women. Epstein, for his part, allegedly in the early 2000s abused and sexually assaulted and raped numerous girls as young as 14. He paid some of the girls to find other victims for him.
The UK’s Prince Andrew is alleged to have abused a girl who was trafficked to him by Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell. (Andrew denies the charges; Maxwell has been convicted of conspiring to sexually abuse minors.) There is, however, no evidence that Trump knew of Epstein’s activities, or that he participated. One Epstein victim said she had met Trump while with Epstein, but did not allege any wrongdoing on his part. Trump says he and Epstein had not been close for years before Epstein hanged himself in jail in 2019.
Williams, though, details an assault that she says took place while Epstein was actually standing beside her. And she suggested that she believes the two men coordinated the attack on her. She says she saw Trump and Epstein smiling at each other, adding she thought the assault was part of a “twisted game” the two men had arranged.
Does it matter?
So, to sum up, Trump has a long history of being accused of sexual assault. He has been held liable for sexual assault. The logical conclusion is that Trump regularly sexually assaulted women for decades.
You would think this would be a central issue of any political campaign involving Donald Trump. And in fact Trump’s history of sexual misconduct was a major controversy in 2016. During the last weeks of that campaign, a tape was leaked to the press in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women. Before a 2005 taping of Access Hollywood, Trump told television host Billy Bush that he would often kiss women without waiting for their consent: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
The tape rightfully created a firestorm for the Trump campaign. It prompted many of his accusers to come forward. It also led numerous Republicans to denounce him. This included House Speaker Paul Ryan who said he was “sickened” by Trump’s remarks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. Republican Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer said Trump should step aside in favor of vice presidential candidate Mike Pence. It looked for a moment like Trump would lose mainstream GOP support and lose the election badly.
Instead, Trump refused to step down, the GOP establishment ended up supporting him, and he narrowly won the electoral college.
Since then, Trump’s victory has largely been treated as a sign that the electorate is not interested in and will not punish him for allegations (or even jury adjudications) of sexual violence. The accusations of sexual assault against Trump were not much discussed in the 2020 election. And they haven’t played much role in 2024 either.
Trump’s trial for assaulting Carroll was mostly covered as a trial rather than as an issue which voters should consider. There was a slew of New York Times op-eds about how Biden was too old to be president, but there was not a corresponding wealth of New York Times op-eds about how Trump being found liable of sexual assault meant that he was unfit. In the two presidential debates, the moderators did not ask Trump about the E. Jean Carroll judgements, signaling to voters that his history of sexual violence is not politically important.
We should treat it as if it matters, because it does
Again, given Trump’s victory in 2016 and the media’s general indifference to his history of sexual misconduct since then, it’s easy to just assume that Williams’s allegations will have little impact, or that they aren’t important. Cynicism seems justified.
But it isn’t. In the first place, Trump’s history of violence against women matters in itself, whether or not it affects the election. The survivors who have come forward, including Carroll and Williams, are incredibly brave. They know that Trump will attack them using harsh, misogynist, violent rhetoric. They know his supporters will respond with death threats (as they did to Carroll) and possibly worse than death threats. They know that Trump may well be president and that he will not hesitate to use the power of the office to go after those he considers personal enemies. They know, better than just about everyone, what it means to be targeted by Trump. They deserve better from the public, and from the media, than to be told that their stories and their courage don’t matter.
Secondly, it’s not necessarily true that Trump’s ugly history hasn’t mattered in past elections. Remember that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and the election in 2020. His personal popularity has always been low — he’s currently 9 points underwater in 538’s aggregator, with 53 percent having an unfavorable opinion of him. (Harris’s approval is 48 percent unfavorable, 46 percent favorable.) Trump is losing women voters by about 11 points according to polls — similar to margins he lost by in 2020 and 2016. It seems likely that Trump’s personal unpopularity, especially among women, has something to do with the fact that he compulsively insults women and has been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual assault.
Finally, whether or not something matters is in part a function of whether the media and the public decides it does. Repeating “this doesn’t matter” can actually ensure that something doesn’t affect the election or isn’t considered of importance.
Williams’s accusation could be a one or two day story which fades into the background of the campaign. Or it could be an opportunity for mainstream media to remind readers of Trump’s disgusting history — not least of the fact that he has been held liable for sexual assault, and then again held liable for defaming his victim. The New York Times and Washington Post could do follow up interviews with Carroll and other victims. The news networks could make Trump’s history of sexual harassment and abuse a major focus of the last week of the campaign.
So far, as of Thursday afternoon, coverage beyond the initial story in the Guardian is sparse. NYT, Washington Post, and CNN do not have stories up about the allegations, though People does.
We don’t know if large outlets will treat Williams’s story with the coverage it deserves. But whether they do or not is a choice, not a universal truth determined by the fact that Trump won in 2016.
There’s no one trick or one October surprise for fending off the rise of fascism in America. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and bigotry are popular in the US today as they have been in the past. GOP partisanship is a powerful force and many Republicans will vote for anyone, no matter how disgusting, rather than vote for a Democrat. But Trump’s abuse of women throughout his life and career is an important measure of his lack of fitness, as a president and as a human being. It matters, and we should say so.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and if you’re in the US — vote!
It is really scary, that whatever Trump does, have done or says, the MSM and his followers seem to accept it. He should be a clear loser in this election but instead could end up winning. Where is the solidarity with all the women he has sexually assaulted?
Thank you, Noah for another brilliant article of real importance.
It is difficult to imagine how a woman, or a father with daughters, could support such a misogynist. That is, until I made an investment of understanding human cognitive biases. For example, Dunning-Kruger, where a small amount of knowledge and understanding, makes us an expert, is fully on display. Sigh. If only our education system included more emphasis on understanding the self rather than knowing that the capital of North Dakota is Bismarck. Yet, I am not so naive to believe that those in power who prefer subjugation of others are quite happy with what is happening.