It was unclear until the end which way the jury would go in the E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump trial. Would members believe the 79-year-old woman who speaks out about her alleged rape at the hands of the former president and current presidential candidate? Or would they believe the defendant, who never appeared in court and never called a single witness — and whose lawyers believed the trial was a sham, engineered by a vengeful woman to take down a powerful man?
In the end, they found Mr. Trump liable in the civil suit — both for sexual assault and for defaming Ms. Carroll — and awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages. It’s hard not to think that what they saw, not just what they heard, played a role.
Sitting there every day in Manhattan federal court, Ms. Carroll presented the exact opposite of the “crazy job” Mr. Trump had described in his video statement. She didn’t look “mentally ill.” She didn’t look like the money and fame robber Mr. Trump’s lawyers described. She was an almost perfectly calibrated study in neutrality, composure, and composure, both in the way she spoke during her testimony and the way her appearance spoke for her.
It was almost as if she was answering a question she might have once been asked as Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean: “I’m about to testify in a rape trial. I am a civilian and the accused is a man who once served in the Oval Office. What should I wear to amplify my voice and get people to take it seriously?
After all, it was partly about the appearance. Mr. Trump made it so when he announced “She’s not my type” as part of his defense after Ms. Carroll’s accusations first appeared in a New York magazine excerpt from her 2019 memoir. What Ms. Carroll looked like would always be a factor in the calculations – even 30 years after the alleged incident happened. Her lawyers reminded the jury of her presence — of her pure physical self — in their closing arguments, pointing out that Mr. Trump hadn’t been there to look the jurors in the eye. Like all sexual assault victims taking their cases to court, her body was at the center of the case. What she did on that body, how she presented it mattered.
“Optics are critical in assault and sexual harassment cases because you have people looking for something that suggests a victim has asked for it or wants attention,” said Debra Katz, one of the founders of Katz Banks Kumin and a civil rights attorney who represented Christine Blasey Ford, among others, and who attended part of the Carroll trial but has no relation to her team. Indeed, clothing has been considered a legitimate subject in sexual harassment cases since 1986, when the Supreme Court heard Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson and ruled that “provocative clothing” could be taken as evidence.
“You have to overcome gender biases and prejudices about who is being attacked,” Ms Katz said. “And that means presenting a plaintiff in a serious manner that doesn’t distract from the testimony.”
Indeed, said Molly Levinson, communications advisor to Ms. Caroll and her attorneys, “We wanted to make sure everyone heard her voice and her testimony loud and clear,” in part by having her present as neutral an image as possible.
Mrs. Carroll arrived for the first day of the trial in a cream coat over a chocolate shirt dress and a crisp white shirt with an almost priestly collar. She wore small pearl earrings and carried a leather briefcase. On Day 2, she wore a navy blue suit and another spotless white shirt, buttoned up to the neck. Then she showed up in a boxy cream jacket and skirt and a matching turtleneck. Then a navy jacket with brass buttons and a military collar. A white coat and a black turtleneck. A pearl gray belted jacket over another black turtleneck and matching skirt.
Her clothes were simple and tailored, with no visible logos. Neat. Respectful but not frumpy. Definitely not flashy. Her hair was done in a controlled bob. She wore tights, a generation telling. Her collars were often high and protective.
Impressions are made from such details. Credibility is built from such details. Do you believe her? She looked consistent and reliable day in and day out. She didn’t hesitate – not in her style or her story. When she recounted the gruesome details of what she said had happened to her in the gilded world of Bergdorf Goodman, a store so much a part of Manhattan myth that it has its own movie, she plausibly looked like she could have been there. shopping – but not indulgent. Not so often that it would be impossible to deal with.
It was so effective that people started to wonder if someone was faking her style. Well, her lawyers, duh. It has long been understood that looks are part of any courtroom drama.
“All of us who do this work understand these issues,” Ms. Katz said. Every accessory, every stray wire is a potential trigger for the watching world.
That’s not to say that Ms. Carroll’s team employed a professional stylist. Ms. Carroll didn’t redress herself, nor did Anna Sorokin, the high society con artist who let Anastasia Walker, a former Glamor magazine staffer turned stylist, choose clothes for her courtroom appearances. (Lawyers generally eschew “stylists” for “advisors,” though the subtle differences between those terms are debatable.) Ms. Carroll, however, has a history in fashion. That is not an insignificant fact. She had access to a brain trust of women who have always taken fashion seriously. They were able to help her analyze her closet.
That was a point of difference at Elle, in Mrs. Carroll’s day: fashion for the thinking woman. (Full disclosure: I worked there in late 1995 and 1996, but Mrs. Carroll and I didn’t know each other.)
Mrs. Carroll would have known not to dismiss fashion as a frivolous issue, unworthy of consideration in such a potentially explosive and public process. She would have known that the footage that came out of the event would be part of how a jury saw her – literally – and how her story was told and retold for the world. She would have known that it is impossible not to look at people and reject them or judge them credibly because of how they look – that making such mercurial judgments is part of human nature, even if we are not even aware of what we do.
She wore a black tie, white shirt, and black skirt and tights on the cover of her book “A Dog in Heat Is a Hot Dog and Other Rules to Live By” as far back as 1996.
Ultimately, the solutions she and her team devised for the court may be just as enduring a part of the historical record of this time as the words she uttered in the pages of the magazine she once worked at or the books she wrote.
As of this writing, she will not be known as the author of “What Do We Need Men For?” or even a well-received biography of Hunter S. Thompson, but as the woman who sued a former president for rape and was awarded $5 million for sexual assault and libel. She is forever part of the story of Mr. Trump’s unprecedented legal quagmire and the long tail of #MeToo.
Part of the photo.