“I have not been raped,” Trump rape accuser E. Jean Carroll said in an interview the New York Times posted Thursday morning.
Author E. Jean Carroll made a rape claim against President Trump in an excerpt of her book – What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal – posted in New York Magazine last week.
She claimed the alleged assault took place in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995, but there are no witnesses, tapes, or reports to back up her accusation.
The mainstream media were quick to give Carroll a platform, but as her public appearances increased, her claims progressively weakened.
In an interview with the New York Times’ podcast, The Daily, Carroll denied being raped altogether.
“Every woman gets to choose her word. Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is ‘fight,'” she explained.
“My word is not the victim word. I have not – I have not been raped,” she continued. “I have – something has not been done to me. I fought. That’s the thing”:
This is not the first time Carroll has muddied the waters of her own rape claims. On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Monday, Carroll bizarrely claimed that people consider rape “sexy”:
Sexual violence is in every country in every strata of society, and I just feel that so many women are undergoing sexual violence,” Carroll explained. “Mine was short. I got out. I’m happy now. I’m moving on. And I think of all the women who are enduring constant sexual violence. So this one incident, this one, what, three minutes in this little dressing room, I just say it’s a fight. That way I’m not the victim, right? I’m not the victim.
Cooper asked Carroll if she felt like a victim. She said, “I was not thrown on the ground and ravished, which the word rape carries so many sexual connotations.”
“This was not sexual. It just – it hurt,” she said.
“I think most people think of rape as a violent assault,” Cooper said.
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy – think of the fantasies,” she replied.
Prior to that interview, Carroll told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that she would not pursue rape charges against Trump because it would be “disrespectful” to women who are being raped “around the clock” on the southern border and around the world.
Trump quickly dismissed Carroll’s claims, noting that he had “never met this person.”
“I’ve never met this person in my life,” Trump said in a statement. “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
“It’s just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence,” he continued. “Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news — it’s an epidemic.”