The message should have been codified during the #MeToo 2010s after decades, if not centuries, of women reporting sexual assaults and authorities doing little to nothing to help them. Tangible proof of change was everywhere: Bill Cosby fell from grace. Harvey Weinstein wound up in jail.
And though it took awhile, the Tate brothers are finally behind bars. Institutions would finally take claims of rape seriously, and young men would have a better understanding of consent and the consequences. Last month, a former Cornell University student identified only as Jane Doe sued seven fraternity brothers and the university, claiming the school failed to protect her and punish the perpetrators.
Doe says she was plied with drugs and alcohol and gang-raped by the men during a party at the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024. Cornell conducted an internal investigation and suspended or expelled some of the men, but prosecutors did not bring criminal charges against any of the accused. There’s no point asking how we got back here, when President Trump himself is proof that some folks never budged in the first place.
Trump said Friday that the accused men “won’t get a fair shake,” in response to a reporter’s questions about the case and the appointment of a special prosecutor, Letitia James. In painting the accused as victims, it appeared the president was speaking from personal experience. Trump was found liable in 2023 for sexual abuse and battery in a lawsuit filed by the writer E.
She said that in a dressing room in a high-end department store in 1995 or 1996, Trump pushed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and sexually assaulted and penetrated her before she was able to flee. In the civil trial, Carroll said that the assault made her “unable to have a romantic life again.” She was awarded $5 million in damages. Trump still denies all wrongdoing, calling the allegations a “hoax” and the rulings politically motivated.
In 2005, when he was a reality TV host, Trump bragged on a hot mic about sexually assaulting women in his now infamous “Grab ‘em by the pussy” boast. He promptly apologized when the recording was leaked before the 2016 election, only to walk it back after he won, suggesting the recording was a deepfake (it was not). And he expressed more than one well wish for Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, after her arrest on a multitude of sex-related charges in 2020.
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