Sometimes the story is all the justice you get

Back in March Dan Schorr and Jenna Farrell, co-hosts of The Title IX and Civil Rights Podcast, invited me to talk about the depiction of campus sexual misconduct in MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR. I was apprehensive at first—what do I know about Title IX?—but our conversation was fascinating.

Dan and Jenna are lawyers whose work focuses on Title IX and civil rights disputes that arise in institutions of higher learning. The kind of thing that happens between Isabel and Zev in the novel’s first chapter is, for lack of a better term, their bread and butter. We covered a lot of topics, including Isabel’s relationship with Connelly and faculty/student relationships in general, something they also consider in their legal work. We talked about Monica Lewinsky, the 90s, Jerry Seinfeld and the high school student he dated and Jewish representation in the book.

I was particularly interested in their perspective on the scene that opens the novel, when Isabel and Zev have sex, because it is the scene I am most often asked about. Dan was clear on what happened there: according to him, when Isabel asks Zev to “slow down a little” and he replies “I don’t think I can,” that makes the encounter nonconsensual. This exchange is what he would focus on during an investigation because in that moment, Isabel is sending a clear signal of non-affirmative consent. I have sometimes been pressed to say whether or not I think Zev raped Isabel, and I usually refuse to answer that question because my interest lies in exploring the nuance and gray areas surrounding sexual consent. But to hear that Dan and Jenna saw a clear answer in the text was extremely validating.

I am very grateful for the work Dan and Jenna do to help people get justice in the aftermath of sexual assault. And yet I continue to feel that the tools we have to repair those harms are clumsy at best. If Zev did rape Isabel, what would justice look like? Would Zev be arrested? Expelled? It is hard to imagine either outcome based on the nature of their encounter, especially in the 90s. And yet the alternative—doing nothing—feels wrong too.

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Justice and what it looks like is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately watching E. Jean Carroll testify against Donald Trump in a New York City courtroom. In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump denied the claim and Carroll sued him for defamation.

To be honest, I didn't follow the trial very closely because I found it too painful. It is hard for me to continue to bear witness to Trump and the wreckage he has caused. The story of the attack is of course upsetting and infuriating (and completely believable given what we know about the man), but so is the attack that followed when Trump accused Carroll of being a “liar” and a “nut job” and that her story was a “hoax” and a “con job.” Even after a jury found in Carroll’s favor, Trump continued to insult and demean her, prompting Carroll to say she would consider suing him again. She is my absolute fucking hero.

On the stand, Carroll was criticized for not remembering the exact date the attack occurred, for not calling the police, for not screaming. This is how our justice system works, and it’s not a bad thing: it requires clear and cohesive narratives in order to mete out justice, but we know that is not how trauma works. (Imagine Isabel being asked to construct a narrative around what happened with Zev.) Carroll could actually tell you a lot about the attack—how it felt in her body, what she was wearing, who she called afterward—but because she could not remember the exact date and because she did not call the police—which is what victims are supposed to do—her entire story becomes suspect, at least in the eyes of our patriarchal justice system which privileges certain kinds of facts over others.

In an essay I have out today at Lit Hub, I write about something that happened to me when I was a college freshman and how fiction helped me find a way to finally tell my story. But the part I didn’t include in the essay is the way I was publicly attacked after I spoke up—and by speaking up I mean talking about what happened with friends and trusted adults. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for by telling my story—I had no sense at all that I would get justice for what had happened—but I needed to talk about it so I could make sense of it the way I make sense of everything: through story.

When my assailant found out what I was saying, he lashed out by writing an op-ed in our school newspaper defending himself against my accusations, accusations I had not made public—he did. He accused me of misinterpreting what had happened between us—that is, misinterpreting what had happened to my own body. My use of the word rape to describe what happened, he wrote, amounted to “crying wolf.” He wrote many more things but I won’t honor them with more airtime here.

It is hard to explain how important the op-ed page of the college newspaper was to a college community in the 1990s. It was our public square, the place where we haggled out issues and controversies. So my assailant’s decision to attack me there was intentionally designed to frighten and intimidate me. While I was struggling to understand the harm that had been done to me, he claimed to know exactly what had happened. He pressed hard against the vulnerabilities I already felt about my own story, articulating the doubts I already felt about that night and my own culpability. And presenting it on a public stage, with the black-and-white imprimatur of journalistic truth, gave his words weight I felt mine did not have.

And so I stopped talking, in part because I wanted to forget about it and have the college experience I had worked so hard to get. But also—and I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this at the time—I didn’t have a clear picture of what justice would look like for me. I couldn’t imagine someone like Dan or Jenna swooping in to make sense of what had happened, perhaps because such people did not exist.

But the things we put away and save for later never really leave us. Exhibit A: E. Jean Carroll.

As Rebecca Traister wrote recently in New York Magazine (before a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll five million dollars), the very fact of the trial, regardless of the outcome, demonstrates the ongoing power of #MeToo: “Metrics of feminist success have rarely been about legal victories and criminal convictions,” she writes. “The dynamic shifts provoked by the Weinstein and Bill Cosby cases began when the women they’d aggressed upon came forward, asserting their humanity and their right to speak, to challenge powerful men who expected their continued silence.”

Don't forget: We live in a culture where women are paid to stay silent, and not just sometimes—often. It is one of the many things the Trump years laid bare.

And sometimes telling our story is the only justice we get. “Being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me,” Carroll said from the stand. I had no evidence, no proof of what had happened to me, the same way Carroll couldn’t “prove” what had happened to her. All I had is what she had: my story—and my feelings, those slippery female things—and my assailant tried to take it from me. This is why, ultimately, victims speak up, not because they believe it will change anything but because if they don’t, what happened to them will disappear forever. That is also why they are silenced.