Donald Trump has a playbook for responding to sexual assault allegations, and he pulled it out again Monday night in response to Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll’s account of him raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump claimed in an interview with The Hill.
Classic Trump: The insult to the woman’s looks comes first, and then the denial. And the fact that we’ve heard it all before—not just the sexual assault allegation but also the denial-by-insult—is kinda meaningful here. “With all the women it’s the same: He denies it, he turns it around, he attacks, and he threatens—and then everybody forgets it until the next woman comes along,” Carroll told CNN. Which is exactly how it happens.
And of course “She’s not my type” is not a response to a rape allegation. Rape is not about sex; it’s about power—and does grossly attempting to assert his power over women seem like a thing Donald Trump wouldn’t do? The man is all about asserting dominance at all times.
Trump has also claimed not to have known Carroll at the time, despite a picture of the two of them and their then-spouses at a party some years before the alleged assault.
As many people have by now observed, it’s not “he said-she said,” it’s “he said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said-she said” … and in fact, Trump did describe his own habits as “grab ‘em by the pussy,” so what he said in private, when he didn’t know the world could hear, and what she (and she and she and she and she) said are the same thing.