The Fury of #MeToo Finally Comes for the Man Who Inspired It

NYT OPINION: The Fury of #MeToo Finally Comes for the Man Who Inspired It
By Michelle Goldberg
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 9, 2023 at 03:00AM

After more than a dozen allegations of sexual abuse, Donald Trump is held accountable.

With the $5 million verdict against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll trial, the #MeToo movement comes full circle. Trump’s election in 2016, after he’d been heard boasting of sexual assault on the “Access Hollywood” tape and accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, set off a tsunami of female fury. That fury powered the Women’s March. It inspired countless women — some of them previously apolitical suburbanites — to put their lives on hold and throw themselves into activism or to run for office themselves. And that fury, that intolerable sense of incredulous disgust and civic violation, was the spark that set off the #MeToo movement, as women, unable to do anything about the abuser running the country, turned their energy toward those in their own institutions, including the entertainment industry. I’ve long been convinced that Trump was the reason revelations about Harvey Weinstein led to a nationwide paroxysm. The #MeToo movement is why E. Jean Carroll wrote the memoir in which she revealed that Trump violated her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in the mid-1990s. “As the riotous, sickening stories of #MeToo surged across the country, I, like many women, could not help but be reminded of certain men in my own life,” she wrote. The movement is the reason that in 2022, New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, which created a window during which sexual assault survivors could sue their attackers even beyond the statute of limitations. (The movement is also the reason the bill was signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, not a disgraced Andrew Cuomo.)

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/e-jean-carroll-donald-trump-verdict-metoo.html