Two Women, Two Breasts, Two Decisions
‘I Moved on
Her Very Heavily’: Part 2
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Story by E. Jean Carroll
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· SEPTEMBER
2, 2020
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused
Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the
president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot,
she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say
that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other
powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning.
Which might seem surprising, until you remember Trump’s modus operandi: He
escapes the consequences of one outrage by turning our focus to another, in
perpetuity. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is
interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent
“moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like
a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Grab ’em by the pussy.” Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; a White House
spokesman denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old
false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and
rejected by the American people.”
Photograph by Gillian Laub
fifty or so miles out of new york city, in a hamlet so rich, it makes Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach
look like a John Mellencamp video, there lives a beautiful woman by the name of
Karena Virginia. Today is a brilliant Monday. The sun pours down like Fort Knox
gold. Karena has conducted an angel sanctuary over the weekend—connecting her
friends (she calls clients “friends”) with the supernatural beings she believes
are as real as each of us—and later today she is teaching friends to breathe in
tune with the ocean waves for “Yoga on the Beach.”
When I pull up in my car, Karena is standing in the road.
To welcome me, she raises the brim of her enormous beach hat and holds a pose
on one foot, lifting her arms to the gods like a forest sprite. If William
Blake—the poet and artist who conversed with angels in the nude—could see
Karena in her turquoise sarong and turquoise bikini bottom with the circle
clasp on the hip, her long, golden-brown hair streaming down her back, he would
paint her with wings.
Donald Trump once spots Karena at the U.S. Open tennis
tournament as she waits for a car, but he doesn’t paint her. It is 1998, and
she recalls that he says to his male pals, “Hey, look at this one.
We haven’t seen her before.”
“I am wearing a short, black, sleeveless A-line dress,”
continues Karena, who can also tell me the exact skirt, sweater, and shoes she
is wearing when she meets her husband a year later. “I call my friend
immediately after I get in the car and tell her what happened and ask if she
thinks it is because my dress is too short. I remember thinking my protective
Italian father would have been appalled at my outfit, because Trump, as he is
walking toward me with his entourage, says: ‘Look at those legs.’ It’s my fault
that I allow him to grab my arm without my pulling away. And then he goes
further”—she demonstrates, quickly sliding her knuckles back and forth on the
right side of her bust—“and he grabs my breast.”
Now let us leave Karena and visit a handsome apartment on
the Upper West Side. It is 21 years later, June 2019. A lawyer sits in an
armchair suckling a newborn. The child is about the size of a basset hound—he
weighed nearly 10 pounds at birth—and the lawyer, a peach-complexioned looker
(yes, reader, another pretty woman, but we are dealing with a
man who, you’ll recall, denies that he attacks women by claiming they’re not
“his type”), glances up from the giant baby. “This is off the record,” she
announces to her companions, several women who are being interviewed about
sexual assault.
The lawyer is not taking part in the discussion, but her
story is so on point that she couldn’t help but chime in. The journalist
is The New York Times’ Megan Twohey, who in 2016
reported some of the earliest sexual-misconduct allegations against Trump and
who, along with Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow, won the Pulitzer Prize for
breaking the Harvey Weinstein story.
“Of course,” Twohey says, off the record.
And the lawyer says: “Trump grabbed my boob.”
so this is a few words about Trump and a few more words about breasts. One of
the breasts belongs to a woman who, three weeks before the 2016 election, comes
forward and warns the world not to vote for a man who gropes women. The other
belongs to a woman who has stayed quiet. Which woman is happier with her
decision? Is it the yoga teacher/angel connector, or the attorney? We must go
back and forth in time to find out.
i meet karena in 1994, when we both work for Roger Ailes at his NBC cable
network, America’s Talking. (It later becomes MSNBC, and Roger goes on to
create Fox News.) I am the host of the live, one-hour Ask E. Jean show.
Karena, a theater major straight out of Ithaca College, is starring in one of
Roger’s experiments called Cable Crossings, a 30-second soap opera airing “in the cracks” between
the talk shows.
I tell you with a straight face that Karena is not a
normal human. For instance, Karena finds most things on Earth pleasant. She has
seen angels since she was a little girl. One of her yoga workshops, for women
who are trying to get pregnant, is called “Mommies and Miracles.” She believes
“energy is everything.” She texts with Oprah (with whom she collaborated on a
seven-part 2015 documentary about spirituality across the globe called Belief).
I suspect that Karena’s spleen has wings raised for flight, and, yes, she has
been told by dullards that she needs to “get a grip.”
So in the countdown to the 2016 election, when America is
caught in the Groundhog Day time loop of women coming forward
to tell of Trump—the truffle pig—rooting around their bodies, Karena is in the
family room on the chaise lounge (“One day I want to toss that thing! It brings
back PTSD”), watching the 6:30 news and admiring the courage on display. At the
same time she is thinking, I could never tell my story. I could never
do it, and feeling deeply ashamed.
Then one day a woman—Karena can’t remember who—comes on
TV and calls Trump’s accusers liars. Karena’s very corpuscles
tighten. She starts shaking. She cannot understand why women don’t believe
other women. Karena says to herself: “I teach women to be empowered through
yoga. I tell women they are goddesses of the divine, and here I can’t even talk
about the truth?”
The next night she confesses her shame to a perfect
stranger at a party in the Rainbow Room for the New York screening of La
La Land. The stranger tells her, “You must stand with these women!” After
teaching her morning yoga class the next day, Karena calls an attorney
recommended by a friend. The attorney is Gloria Allred. “I had no clue who she
was,” Karena says. Twenty hours later, she is sitting behind a phalanx of mics
in a hotel conference room and reading her eight-minute, 39-second statement to
the world press.
You remember it. She is as firm as Kamala Harris and
chokes up like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Joan of Arc at the
stake could not have been more dramatic.
It is a disaster. “The fallout from the press
conference,” Karena says, “is a million times—a million times—worse than being
groped by the president.”
the scene now shifts to Santa Monica in 2006. The lawyer with the peach
complexion is booming her new BMW—a law-school graduation present from her
mother—up the circular drive of a Santa Monica Beach hotel, when who should
emerge through the front door?
Oh my God, Donald Trump, thinks the lawyer, who agrees to tell her story as long
as she isn’t named. Fine, whatever—like, he’s old. It is about
five months after Trump pushed Natasha Stoynoff up
against a Mar-a-Lago wall and shoved his tongue down her throat, according to
Stoynoff. The sun is about to set. Trump lasers his eyes through the lawyer’s
windshield.
She pulls up to the valet-parking stand. She alights from
the car, smooths her black sheath (her new lawyer dress!), and, as her three
friends tumble out of the vehicle in a merry burst, ready to celebrate their
last day at law school—excited to be alive, thrilled to be dressed up and
arriving in such a hot ride—and as the valet is saying, “I’m sorry, the hotel
bar is closed for a private event,” Trump appears next to her.
“He comes in from the side,” says the lawyer, who is
Zooming with me. The giant baby is now a year old and is nearly the size of a
race-horse jockey—“and he comes around and puts his meaty arm around me and his
hand goes …”
The lawyer places her own hand on the top part of her
breast. “And so I am immediately uncomfortable,” she says,
“and he is like, ‘Hey, you want to get into the bar? I can get you in.
Just you. Not your friends.’ And at this point, he is
just rubbing my breast.”
I am sorry, reader, I must ask: “The entire breast?”
“The top of the breast, the nipple. He just, like …” She
kneads her breast like it’s a ball of pie dough.
“And I had this whole-body visceral reaction,” she says.
“I was like, I have to get out of here right now. I didn’t say a
word. I turned around. I still had my keys. I got in the car and I was like,
‘Get in, everyone. We’re going.’ They hadn’t seen it happen. They were facing
toward the hotel. We did not talk about it. We fell out of touch pretty quickly
after passing the bar. I was in shock.” (The White House called the allegations
“an anonymously sourced smear.”)
When I try to determine the timelines of Melania Trump
giving birth in Manhattan and her husband feeling up a young law-school grad at
a Santa Monica hotel, the lawyer emits a bitter, sarcastic chuckle. “I don’t
think Melania being perfect or giving birth would stop Trump,” she says. “I
don’t think anything would stop him. He probably did the same thing to 10
different women that night. That’s the thing. I was not
special.”
though karena is as ethereal as Thoreau’s wood nymph, the paradox is that the
life she has created for herself with her lawyer husband and two children is
chock-full of good cheer and success because she is also tough-minded and
confident as a businessperson. In 2001, when her “kids are babies,” she starts
teaching prenatal yoga, then yoga with moms and babies, then yoga for women
who want babies. How good is she? Gloria Allred gets a message
after the press conference from one of Karena’s former clients—excuse me, friends—to
pass the following news on to Karena: “I was in your ‘Mommies and Miracles’
workshop, and I am now a mother!”
Before we start talking about the hideous aftermath of
her press conference, as a sort of warm-up, I ask Karena: “What do you wish you
would’ve done when Trump knuckled your breast?”
I ask because I know that I’m not the only Trump accuser
to imagine punching him repeatedly between mandible and eye socket.
Karena pauses a moment to ponder. We are sitting outside
her friend’s house in two of the most comfortable deck chairs ever built by
human hands, on an emerald lawn, by a blue pool, near a willow so weeping that
it is practically moaning, and we are overlooking—get this—a canal down which
float rich people on pontoons, kayaks, and canoes.
Karena turns to me with her answer.
I lean in, hoping she is about to describe a groin kick
that sends Trump rolling over and over across the DecoTurf of Arthur Ashe
Stadium until he is picked up by the ball girls, stuffed in a bag, and carried
away.
She says: “I would look Trump in the eyes and ask, ‘What
kind of man are you?’”
Yogis! Bah.
Gloria Allred comforts Karena at the press conference,
October 20, 2016. (Jemal Countess / Getty)
“did you think about coming forward before the 2016 election?” I ask the
lawyer.
“I thought about it a bunch,” she says. “But in the
scheme of things, it wasn’t a rape. It was a forcible touch. I wondered: Is it
worth associating my name with that?”
“Forever,” I say.
“Forever. And as a woman, if you ever come forward with
any allegation, it’s like you’re tainted. They pick apart your
work. They pick apart your appearance.” (Indeed. Tributes to my devastating
beauty have been offered daily since I accused Trump of raping me. This tweet,
from @blumrln75—a.k.a. “God Fearing American, Florida saltwater cowboy”—is one
of my favorites: “He [Trump] wouldn’t do you with Joe Biden’s wiener!”)
“So are you glad you didn’t come forward
in 2016?” I ask the lawyer.
“I was worried about my career. It’s already been hard
enough to get where I am as a woman.”
“Do you want to come forward—now—on the record?”
The lawyer graduated with distinction from a prestigious
midwestern university before she went to law school in Los Angeles; she is now
married to a writer. In 2019, she joined a new law firm, when the couple moved
from New York to California.
“That’s the thing,” says the lawyer, trying to frown, but
a grin zings across her face. “I’m up for partner!”
for karena, the consequences of speaking up are swift and severe. “Did you think
you were going to get killed?” I ask her.
“Oh, yeah,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because people were telling me that
they were going to kill me. I was getting death threats.”
After the press conference, four close friends take up
arms and quickly begin deleting the hundreds of hate messages on Karena’s
YouTube channel, her Instagram and Facebook accounts, and her yoga video on
Amazon. “I couldn’t look at any messages from anybody,” she says. “Even the
good ones. I just needed to hide. I started to feel like my skin was burning.
No way of explaining it, unless you’re in it. It was as if there were millions
of little needles in my skin.”
“You walk down your driveway,” I say, “and open your
mailbox—?” This is the driveway that leads to the house that is nestled in one
of the boskiest Republican enclaves on the Eastern Seaboard.
“I got clippings cut out of the newspaper with daggers
drawn through my eyes. They come in with, like, ‘You’re going to die.’ And
swears and awful things. My husband and I took them to the police. Brutal.”
And the reaction from her neighbors?
“The people in the town,” says Karena, with about as much
aspersion as she is capable of, “are very elegant.” In other words,
the shoulder Karena receives from the town is so cold, she needs an ice pick to
leave the house. “Lots of silence.”
Do you want to hear my theory about why the response to
her press conference is so savage? (A) She looks like she’s just
left a lawn party at Jay Gatsby’s. (B) People think the tears she sheds—and dew
rolling down an anemone could not fall more gracefully—are because she’s making
a big deal about Trump seizing her breast. In fact, she is overwhelmed by “the
cameras and the clicking,” as she puts it, and she feels unaccountably moved by
the thought of all the other women who have suffered in silence. And what with
the pressure inherent in publicly accusing a man who is running for president
of the United States of something sexual—of course she cries. Who
wouldn’t?
karena says she loses clients, has to cancel a big book-signing at Barnes &
Noble, and is dropped or not invited back to do “wellness” appearances on TV
shows such as The Doctors, though the show’s producers deny
that. (“It would have been a huge launching pad for my brand. I still sometimes
think about it. Then I remember I have integrity.”) She gets an email from a
famous retreat center canceling her planned appearance, lest Trump supporters
feel uncomfortable. She reads the email and calls her husband. “I’m crying. I
am gasping for air, and I say, ‘This (gasp) just (gasp) happened
(gasp). I ruined my career!”
Does she regret coming forward then?
“My whole entire life, I’ve been considered super
sensitive. But the past three and a half years have been a time of real, true
empowerment for me. When I die, I’m going to know that I stood up for women.
And you know what? It’s been awful seeing how impulsive Trump has been as
president. So in the end, my close friends have said to me, ‘Karena, can you
imagine if you had never said anything and had to watch this?’”
so there you have it. Both Karena and the lawyer are happy with their
decisions.
And by the by, the lawyer does, in fact, tell one person
about what Trump did to her before the 2016 election. She
tells her mom. I know her mother. She is a doctor, a scientist, an
abortion-rights woman, a southern belle, and she loves her daughter. Guess whom
her mom votes for in 2016, knowing he has assaulted her
daughter? That’s right. She votes for Trump: “He’s so good at business.”
Her mother is a busy woman, however. She may not have
heard about all of the women Trump allegedly manhandled. “So I
am speaking to support the women,” Karena tells me. “For those people who were
not able to hear it then, I hope you hear it now. Because the only reason I am
putting myself in this situation again is because this cannot
happen again.”