If Only Me: On E. Jean Carroll

Dialectics and the freedom of funny.

Image of E. Jean Carroll courtesy of shutterstock.com

“Only you,” my friend Puma Perl wrote recently. She was responding to some mishap I’d had.

I do tend to have adventures. I don’t know why; it’s been like this since I was a kid.

I don’t mind. It’s been an unusual life and I’m rarely bored. The Universe obliges me by providing fodder for my work.

I think of what Puma might say in light of yesterday:

“Only you would be telling a gynecologist about being sexually assaulted by another gynecologist during a pelvic exam.”

But I change the words.

If only me.

If only I were the sole woman in the world trying to explain sexual assault to someone who doesn’t understand. If only I were the only woman to catch doubt in a man’s voice.

If only more people made more of an effort to lock up rapists instead of electing them president.

---

At 6:55 am yesterday I heard what sounded like someone coming in the front door.

Secret Service had already left for work. I thought he returned because he forgot his phone or something. I called out and got no response.

Silence.

Not great. I got a bit nervous and thought someone had gotten into the house. I hadn’t set our alarm after he left.

I grabbed a handy weapon—in this case a long hard stick with a metal hook on the end, which we use for opening the attic. If you break into my house, expect to lose an eye.

I got very still and listened, phone in hand, ready to lock myself in the bathroom and call 911.

Nothing. If it were a person, I would have heard them breathing.

I thought,

Is this going to be one of those days (answer: yes, it was indeed one of those days) when there’s a raccoon in the attic or something?

I heard the noise again. I banged the ceiling with the stick to see if some creature moved.

Nothing.

I was relieved. I swear I have PTSD from a raccoon infestation in the Virginia house while my mother was alive. If an animal were in the attic, the noise from the stick would make them scurry away.

I hear the noise again, but just can’t place the origin point. It sounded like a cross between someone dragging a mattress across the floor and a car engine turning over. Maybe it was coming from outside.

Then it stopped.

I quit worrying about it. I had to get to a doctor’s appointment.

---

Before I left, I saw something E. Jean Carroll posted on Substack.

During her trial against Trump, I wrote a piece for CNN about what it had been like for me to testify after being sexually assaulted 40 years ago.

I wanted to answer the question as to why women wait to report assault. This was a big bone of contention with the MAGA crew: why didn’t Carroll report it immediately?

If I have any answer, it’s the answer as to why women don’t report assault.

I wrote the piece and CNN bought it. I was happy to be working with the editor—we’d worked together several times when she was with a different news organization.

But this experience turned.

It took much longer than usual to get the piece edited. The legal department decided I needed to prove every word I wrote. I ended up fact-checking my own rape, which I cannot recommend.

I kept doing the things legal asked. But several days in, I lost it.

The level of fact-checking was over the top. They asked me for a court transcript. I did not have one handy, and was on the cusp of saying something truly unprofessional.

It mirrored my experience on the witness stand. The entire job of a defense attorney is to cast the woman as untrustworthy; she is not to be believed.

There is no amount of money worth being put through that again, and it certainly wasn’t worth what CNN paid.

The editor wanted it published before the verdict. Because of the delays with legal, the piece was published simultaneously with the verdict in Carroll’s favor.

The very night after it was published, CNN hosted a friendly town hall for Trump. He was free to lie with impunity and insult E. Jean Carroll—who had just won a judgment against him.

Every word I wrote was suspect. Every word Trump said was applauded.

Screw this, I thought.

Laurie Stone helped me set up my Substack. I haven’t looked back.

---

I get to the gynecologist’s office. All was normal. He was doing the breast exam, then rolling his eyes at me after I answered truthfully about whether I did self-exams.

But no lumps.

Then the nurse magically appeared.

It’s now standard practice for a chaperone to be present for a pelvic exam. Her timing was so flawless I asked if he had a secret button to press and summon her instantly.

“Well it’s not secret, it’s right there,” he replied. Humorless.

I tell them both that I like a nurse present, because it wasn’t always so.

Inexplicably, I then say what happened to me, even though only my therapist knows the details. It just came out of my mouth.

“It’s good a nurse is present,” I continue, “because I was sexually assaulted by a gynecologist when I was in my twenties.”

His reply:

“Really?”

I hear the doubt immediately.

Here we go, I think.

He continues:

“I’ve always wondered about those women who accuse doctors of that, it seems so…”

I am a bit jumbled about the word order now, which sentence followed what.

I told him I wasn’t going to talk about details because I find it upsetting.

(Understatement.)

I did let him know how Predator Doctor set it up:

This part of the exam only has to happen every ten years or so, he lied.

My doctor scoffed, and said,

“But that’s so stupid! How could he think that…”

I cut him off. I wasn’t sure who he was calling stupid, me or the doctor, and did not want to find out.

I explained I was in my twenties, this was thirty years ago, before anything was talked about much; nor did I know to question doctors. I assumed what the doctor said was true because,

First do not harm.

I didn’t tell them I told no one until I was 55 years old.

---

I knew I couldn’t get upset in front of this doctor, because if I cried, my story would become suspect.

So I told them a different story, a funnier one, about the time another doctor kissed me during an exam.

This was an orthopedist. But I was older and immediately objected to being kissed.

He said,

“Oh no. That wasn’t a “kiss” kiss. That was a kiss like…like Jesus would kiss someone.”

I find this story hilarious, but the joke did not land with my audience. Crickets.

So I said,

“Oh come on. That’s funny.”

“That,” my doctor said, “is stupid.”

I do wish he’d stop using that word.

---

It’s true that talking about being assaulted by a doctor while another one collects a Pap smear sample is probably an only me experience.

I don’t know why I opened my mouth in the first place. But after I did, I had to keep going. I responded to the doubt in his voice while he probed my ovaries.

I finally realized that talking about this with my legs in stirrups was not exactly speaking from a position of power. I couldn’t even see his face.

---

I leave the doctor’s office. I’m not upset.

I don’t think I’m upset. I can’t wait to go home but I’m not upset. I get in the car and drive. It’s five minutes to my house.

As I turn down my block, a giant truck is coming up the skinny street. I see there’s space to move over in front of a parked car. I turn the wheel and immediately take off the driver’s side mirror of a parked BMW with my car.

And scratch the paint off its front panel.

I pull over. I try to stick the plastic covering of the mirror back on the injured car. It doesn’t stay.

We had a Mini Cooper for five minutes, and they’re made by BMW. A piece of plastic on one is approximately $2500.

I look for the owner of the car. I knock on a couple of doors. Nobody is home.

I call the non-emergency line for the police department and tell them what happened. The dispatcher tells me to leave a note on the windshield with my information.

I reach into the console to look for a pen and discover that the small bottle of laundry detergent I bought in Virginia is there, except it spilled. There is no pen, but there is liquid laundry detergent about an inch thick in the bottom of the console. I look for something with which to wipe my hands before I drive down the block to get pen and paper.

I drive back home, then back to the car, leave the note, and drive home again. At this point, I’m not feeling my best.

I hear the noise again as soon as I get inside. Then I see a bird flying around my living room.

Mystery solved.

In the south, a bird in the house means imminent death. It’s not a good omen.

The best part of my day is watching the bird fly out the open door, free at last.

---

E. Jean Carroll has been hard at work with a top-secret project: a book about her two trials with Trump. It’s titled,

Not My Type.

I read another post from her about getting some heat for a word she’d used to describe parts of the trial. The word was “funny.”

There was a bit of outrage over her word choice. I guess nuance is dead.

---

I once told a friend of mine who’d also lost a parent as a teen that there was no one funnier than a kid with a dead parent. He spit out his coffee laughing.

We are funny, and we are dark. Live with it.

Humor can live anywhere. It is a hardy organism, and I’m glad. I would be dead without it.

There can be very funny things in the worst of circumstances.

For instance: I think it’s funny the man who assaulted me was found guilty of fornication instead of rape. In 1983 and until 2020 it was against the law to have sex outside of marriage in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Thou Fornicator! Get thee behind me, Fornicator!

There is a word for two opposing ideas at once: dialectic.

---

I think people are outraged by E. Jean Carroll’s use of “funny” because she’s thriving. Trump did not break or ruin her. She isn’t ashamed. She’s successful.

How infuriating. The audacity of appreciating absurdity—how dare she.

Unless a woman is reduced to a pile of blood and bones, a portion of society will always question whether she’s “really” been raped. And I suppose unless you spend the rest of your days speaking in hushed tones while looking mournfully out the window, you can’t have been raped.

I’m just trying to find the logic.

---

After I free the bird—he must have had a long day, stuck in the house all morning—I’m incapable of writing a word. My nerves are shot.

Bad nerves, my family used to say.

I need to go to DMV but because of the Real ID nightmare, they refuse to see me. I do not have the required appointment.

I ask some questions of the supervisor and he responds in a way that reminds me of a principal talking to a sixth-grade student.

That does it. Not sixth grade on top of everything else. I start to cry. The supervisor remains unmoved, so I go home.

---

After I put on my pajamas, it occurs to me I’m having an overblown response to the events of the day.

But then I remember I had to explain sexual assault by doctors to my doctor during a pelvic exam, and think perhaps I’m not doing so badly after all.

---

I wake up today and remember that E. Jean Carroll will be doing a guest spot on Joyce Vance’s Substack Live.

As they start speaking about the trial, I begin to feel queasy. There is nothing I find more upsetting than descriptions of trials and courtrooms. I wonder if I should leave.

But then my mood improves. Because E. Jean doesn’t just say “funny” in describing what went on; she says, “hilarious.”

She doubled down. Well done.

She mentions that Joyce Vance helped her prepare for the trial, so she knew what to expect.

Oh, I think. She had support. She had a friend.

I see this happening in front of my eyes: two highly intelligent, successful women, fully engaged with the world, dissecting a trial in which one of them won a judgment against our current president.

These two are making it easier for all the rest of us to live. They’re laughing together.