My email inbox over the weekend was flooded with stories about the appointments of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense and Matt Gaetz to Attorney General. Most of them were what might be called nuts and bolts pieces about the process. One of the biggest was a story reporting that Senator Mitch McConnell told someone at a D.C. party that the Senate won’t be forced into recess so that newly-installed President Donald Trump could push through his nominees as recess appointments. Apparently, Senator McConnell found it necessary to make this statement because several of Trump’s nominees, including Hegseth and Gaetz, are so execrable they face what is referred to as “stiff opposition” to confirmation by the GOP-controlled Senate. Some pundits even went so far as to opine that McConnell was drawing a line in the sand to protect the prerogatives of the legislative body to which he has devoted much of his adult life.
The #MeToo movement shouldn’t be over because Donald Trump was elected president. It should be just getting started.
Do you know what I noticed about the flood of stories about Trump’s Cabinet picks in my inbox? How none of them talked about what kind of small, weak man it takes to sexually assault a woman or pay for sex with an underage girl. Let’s step back for a moment and get into what we are talking about here. We just went through a presidential election in which the winning candidate, Donald Trump, is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer than 25 women. That man received the votes of some 76 million of his fellow Americans. He took a few days off to celebrate – numerous photos of a big post-election party at Mar-a-Lago hit the internet during the past week or so – and then he got down to business appointing candidates for 12 Cabinet positions in 12 days. Two of those appointments went to men who face the same kind of charges of sexual crimes that Donald Trump has been accused of.
What has happened here with Trump’s election and his appointments of Hegseth and Gaetz is that more than half the voters in the United States have said that sexual assault and trafficking in underage girls for the purposes of sex is okay. Go ahead, guys. Do what you want with women. The newly elected President of the United States has nominated a sexual predator to be in charge of the Department of Justice. Gaetz is not going to spend a lot of time in office going after men for committing the same kinds of crimes he or Trump has been accused of.
Do you want to know how bad this is? There are credible figures that show at least one in four women in this country has been the victim of some form of sexual abuse or assault. That means there probably is a woman living on your street or in your apartment building or working in the same building you work in who has suffered sexual violation of some kind. What was made clear to these women, who must walk around every day of their lives reliving the trauma they survived, is that their terrible experiences don’t matter to at least 76 million Americans.
What was said on Nov. 5, 2024, is that a majority of American voters don’t care that you were sexually assaulted and or abused. It’s okay that those men did that to you. In fact, we’re going to put someone in the White House who stands accused of doing the same thing more than 25 times to women just like you, and we’re going to allow him to appoint men to his Cabinet who are alleged to have committed the same offenses.
Let’s think about these men and what they did for a moment.
Take Donald Trump. He was one of the most famous men in New York City for decades. Stories about him appeared almost daily in the New York Post gossip column Page Six. He was written about in Forbes and Fortune magazines and the New York Times. Television networks covered him when he opened his casinos in Atlantic City and started Trump Airlines. He was so famous, so powerful, that he could tell his secretary or assistant to get him the phone number of the hot young actress who was written about on Page Six right alongside the column item about himself, and he could call her up and say, hey, would you like to go out to dinner with me tonight? How about we go see a movie? I can get tickets to see the Rolling Stones, would you like to go with me? Because he was so famous and so wealthy, he knew there was a good chance the woman he called would say yes, and having squired her around Manhattan in a big Town Car and taken her to see a movie that just opened or Elton John at Madison Square Garden, one thing was likely to lead to another, and…
But that’s not the way Donald Trump treated women, wining and dining and impressing them. No, what he allegedly did was sit next to a woman he didn’t know in first class on a flight and reach over and grab her breasts and force his hand up her skirt without passing a word with her, and certainly not asking permission. Think about the woman on the plane. She recognizes him. So do most of the other people sitting in first class. She’s got a life when she gets off that airplane, maybe a boyfriend or a husband, and certainly, if she’s in first class, she’s got a good job or the kind of money it took to fly first class. Is she going to make what was back then euphemistically called “a scene” and call the flight attendant and tell them to have the pilot call the police in the city where the plane would land and have Donald Trump arrested for sexual assault?
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We know the answer to that question. None of the women called the police. They were too afraid and intimidated, or they thought they wouldn’t be believed, or they thought Trump would sue them for defamation if they told anyone.
What those women did was live with the fact that it happened to them. Some might have felt shame, some may have even blamed themselves and asked, what did I do wrong? Was it the way I was dressed? The way I looked at him?
Trump would go on to admit to an “Access Hollywood” reporter, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
He came right out and admitted to sexually assaulting women, and he was elected president in 2016. He spent the next eight years denying that he had assaulted any women. He denied that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Confronted with a photo showing them together at a party, he denied that he even knew her.
Think about that. The woman whom a judge said out loud in civil court had been raped by Donald Trump because he had inserted his fingers in her vagina was further belittled when Trump denied that he had ever seen her.
Can you imagine how powerless and small that made E. Jean Carroll feel, when in fact, the one who was weak and small was Donald Trump?
Take Hegseth, the man Trump wants to oversee three million men and women in uniform and countless civilian employees of the Department of Defense. In 2017, Hegseth was famous enough as a figure who appeared frequently on Fox News that he was invited to address a gathering of conservative Republican women in Monterey, California. He had been married and at the same time in an extramarital relationship with a producer at Fox News that produced a daughter. After giving his speech to the conservative Republican women, Hegseth met several women at the hotel bar and proceeded to get drunk. He was so drunk that one of the women agreed to walk him back to his hotel room. Hegseth allegedly lured her into his room and raped her. A couple of days later, she reported the assault to the police. She was examined and found to have bruises on her legs, and a rape kit showed the presence of semen in her vagina. The Monterey police say that they investigated the incident. For some unknown reason, they did not charge Hegseth with committing sexual assault or rape.
Later, having watched Hegseth’s climb through the ranks of Fox News to become a weekend host of “Fox and Friends,” the woman threatened to sue Hegseth for sexual assault. He paid her money to drop the threat of the lawsuit in return for signing a non-disclosure agreement. Hegseth claims the sexual encounter with the woman, who was staying in the hotel with her husband and two children, was consensual.
If Hegseth wanted to have consensual sex with a woman that night in the Monterey hotel, he could have probably invited one of the women fawning over him at the bar up to his hotel room and convinced her to sleep with him.
But that’s not what he did. He got a married woman with two children to “escort” him to his room and then pounced.
We shall leave aside the question of how these men live with themselves. Instead, let us consider the woman Hegseth traumatized. She had to go to a police precinct and tell the story of her rape by this prominent man to strangers. She had to submit to a vaginal swab from the rape kit. Because Monterey police say that they investigated her claim, she doubtlessly had to submit to other interviews with other strangers. Then she had to sit there as someone, maybe a police official or a prosecutor, told her that Hegseth claimed the sexual encounter in a hotel with a man she did not know personally while her husband and children slept in another room was “consensual.”
Can you imagine what she went through and what she has had to cope with ever since, and most of all, what she is having to relive yet again with Hegseth’s appointment to Trump’s Cabinet?
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I am so disgusted with Matt Gaetz and the story of his long-time interest in sex with underage girls that I can barely stand to type his name. But we know from stories dating to Trump’s first administration that Gaetz had some sort of arrangement with a political friend in Florida, Joel Greenberg, who is currently serving eleven years in prison for committing felonies, including sex trafficking. We know that Greenberg arranged “sex parties” that Gaetz attended with underage girls at which drugs were consumed. This was while Gaetz served as a representative in Congress for a district in Florida.
He is yet another man who could have picked up the phone and asked any woman he wanted to ask to go out on a date with him to a movie or dinner or even to come over to his house. Still, Gaetz had a friend arrange “sex parties,” at least one of which took place in the Bahamas, at which prostitutes were made available, at least one of them underage.
I know I’m repeating these words, small and weak, but it is necessary. These are the men Donald Trump wants to serve at the top of two of the most important departments in our government. We could speculate about why Trump wants men in his Cabinet who have been accused of the same sorts of sexual offenses he has been accused of, but that falls into the trap of making this whole story about them. Instead, the stories should be about the women and the terrible things that were done to them by small and weak men who were nevertheless more powerful and influential than them.
We don’t know the identities of the women who Hegseth and Gaetz assaulted, but we know the identity of at least one woman who was raped by Donald Trump: E. Jean Carroll. When she was photographed or filmed going in and out of the courthouse in Manhattan where her defamation lawsuit against Trump was heard, we saw a poised, well-dressed woman walking or standing with her attorney. She seemed in those photographs, and in interviews such as the one she gave Rachel Maddow, to be self-assured and well-spoken and as it’s often said, “together.”
She may be all those things, but she is also a victim. She had a man take his fingers and shove them into her body against her will in a department store dressing room, and then turn and walk away as if nothing happened. She sees his picture or televised image almost daily, as do the other two-dozen-plus women who claim Donald Trump sexually assaulted them. They must live with what this small, weak man did to them as they watch him on television and read about him in the newspaper. They must stand by as he becomes the next president of the United States, talks with Vladimir Putin and makes decisions about who will be loyal enough to him to qualify for positions in his government.
These stories shouldn’t be about these small, weak men. They should be about the women they traumatized. The #MeToo movement shouldn’t be over because Donald Trump was elected president. It should be just getting started.
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