'I Moved on Her Very Heavily': Part 2

[Celerity]

Two women, two breasts, two decisions

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.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/i-moved-on-her-very-heavily-part-two/615892/



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.”



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[UpInArms]

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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.”

I would probably never speak to my mother again, if that were me.