Someone Finally Made Trump Pay for a Lifetime of Mistreating Women
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/trump-carroll-sexual-assault.html
Someone Finally Made Trump Pay for a Lifetime of Mistreating Women
It’s not nearly enough, but for once, it’s not nothing.
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It’s a little bit of good news in an otherwise bleak landscape for feminists: Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered the president to pay her $5 million. After appeals and delays, that sum has accrued interest, and finally, $5.625 million was delivered to Carroll’s account.
Trump has denied Carroll’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room, calling it “a Hoax and a lie.” But a jury disagreed, and the courts have upheld their decision.
Carroll’s claims first emerged publicly in 2019, at the height of the #MeToo reckoning, when it truly felt like feminists were making huge strides toward recognition of—and even accountability for—sexual violence and harassment. The men felled by the movement are now well known: Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, Les Moonves, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose. Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore was accused of sexually pursuing and assaulting teenage girls when he was in his 30s; he lost his bid for an Alabama Senate seat to Doug Jones, handing Democrats their first Senate win in the state in 25 years. In 2020, Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, and Democrat Joe Biden took the White House.
Since then, much has changed.
The anti-feminist backlash has been swift, shocking, and severe. Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, after being found liable for sexual abuse in the Carroll case. His administration has gone on an anti-feminist and anti-DEI purge, creating a broad chilling effect across companies that has squelched so much as talking about discrimination. Women and people of color face overt discrimination by members of the administration itself, most notably Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has blocked the promotion of women in the military and used social media to promote the idea that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of legal abortion in the U.S.; the result of the ensuing abortion bans has been scores of women with devastating injuries, and some who have died. The aggressive manosphere that helped usher Trump back into power doesn’t just ignore violence against women; they often celebrate it, and some of them engage in it. A birth-rate panic has overtaken the right and much of the middle, with blame heaped squarely on women. The “tradwife” has ascended in American online culture, as influencers make heaps of money pretending they don’t have jobs and telling other women to quit theirs and focus on raising children. Politically and culturally, the boys are back in charge.
And yet, the long sweep of feminist history is never as simple as a winning–losing binary.
Trump has eviscerated America’s democratic institutions, and yet some of those institutions—the courts—upheld a jury verdict against him, and he indeed saw some consequences (even if $5 million is pocket change for a man who has exploited his position to make more than $1 billion in crypto schemes during his first year back in the White House). Roe v. Wade is dead, but reproductive rights activists have created vast networks of support to transfer abortion-seekers out of state and to get abortion pills into women’s hands even in states where abortion is criminalized. Republicans may have decided they’re OK with accused sexual assailants and confirmed misogynists holding higher office, but Democrats decidedly are not, as demonstrated by the recent downfall of Graham Platner and the partywide consensus that men credibly accused of sexual violence should not be in the Senate (or in the White House, or sitting on the Supreme Court bench).
This administration has attacked feminism and feminists, and yet feminism and feminists persist. This administration has attacked democracy and democratic institutions, and yet democracy and democratic institutions persist—battered, imperfect, and badly in need of scaffolding, but still standing. These two things are related: Where democracy is expanding, women’s rights tend to expand, too. And the inverse is also true: When authoritarianism rises and democracy wanes, feminists are often a target, and women’s rights often recede. For the past decade, Americans have been in a fight not just for and about equality, with movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, but for the very nature and foundations of our political system. Are we a representative democracy with expansive civil liberties aiming to be a more perfect (or at least fairer) nation? Or are we a kleptocracy, led by a populist megalomaniacal wannabe autocrat seeking to remake America in his image? Whether women can be equal participants in society, which includes our ability to be treated fairly by the legal system when we seek recompense, is key to answering questions not just about women’s rights, but about American democracy itself.
One woman getting one $5 million award does not feminist victory make. But it’s also not nothing that one woman spent the past decade of her life fighting one of the most powerful men in the world, and she finally got him to pay up. Change is made by political and legal victories as much as by cultural and social shifts, and these things are often difficult to quantify. But when we track the zigzag of progress and backlash, we do so by pinning moments onto our mental timeline. This is one of those pins. It’s not at the far end, where the triumph of full gender equality sits. But it puts feminists a little bit ahead of where we were yesterday.
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