A couple of weeks ago, as the Harvey Weinstein
story continued to spool out across the news, I surveyed the growing pile of
allegations—the horrific and familiar tale of an angry, wealthy,
egotistical man with a casual habit of treating young women as if they
were blow-up dolls. Remarkably, the right things were happening.
Weinstein was being disgraced and disowned, and his accusers applauded
for their bravery. Like many women, I felt simultaneously galvanized,
vindicated, dispirited, and exhausted. A year before—to the day, I
realized—I’d been assembling similar stories about Donald
Trump.

The public narrative of Trump’s sexually predatory behavior begins in
1993, with Harry Hurt’s book “The Lost Tycoon,” which included details
from a 1990 divorce deposition in which Ivana Trump described her
husband violently raping her in Trump Tower, in a fit
of anger over a botched scalp surgery. In a statement provided to Hurt,
Ivana walked back her claim without denying it; she didn’t mean that
Trump raped her in a “literal or criminal” sense, she said. The story
reappeared in May, 2016, when the Times published accounts from two
women describing nonconsensual
encounters with Trump, and then it flared fully back to life in October of that
year, with the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording of a 2005
conversation in which Trump bragged about habitually committing sexual
assault. By the end of October, twenty women had gone on the record to
describe Trump’s sexual misconduct. Twelve of them recounted being
physically violated, corroborating Trump’s own description of his
behavior—he grabbed women by the pussy, he said to Billy Bush, because
he could.

I reread the piece I wrote last year about all of this, and it felt a
little humiliating. It was clear that I had been so upset, and so full
of trust in the weight of moral narrative, that I felt sure Trump would
not be able to win the Presidency. And, over the past year, I realized,
I had also allowed myself to forget the sheer repulsiveness of some of
Trump’s offhand comments about women: that he told his friends to “be
rougher” with their wives, that he seemed to regularly joke about dating
teen-agers. I recently shared the piece on Twitter and received more
than two hundred replies, many of which asked the same sort of question:
Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? Why don’t these women press
charges against the President? Why don’t they get together and sue him?
Where are all these accusers now?

A few of Trump’s accusers have spoken to the media since the Weinstein
story broke. Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People who last year
described Trump pushing her against a wall and forcibly kissing her, in
2005, at Mar-a-Lago, wrote an op-ed for USA Today describing an
encounter during her college years with another man, an Oscar-nominated
actor who grabbed her and said, “I’m going to —- you so hard, you’ll
scream like a whore.” That experience, Stoynoff wrote, “was a factor in
why I didn’t report the Trump incident when it happened.” After both
incidents, she explained, she’d been afraid that the perpetrator would
ruin her career if she spoke out. Jessica Leeds, who told the Times,
last year, that Trump groped her on a plane in the eighties, did an
interview with Slate a few weeks ago. “I’m truly sorry that I didn’t make more of
an impact, that we all didn’t make more of an impact,” she said. “But as
the man says himself, he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody
and his supporters wouldn’t care.” Temple Taggart, a former Miss USA
contestant who says that Trump kissed her inappropriately twice, told
the
paper,
“With Trump, it was all brushed under a rug.”

As for the possibility of pressing charges against
Trump, that window had already closed by last year’s election for
everyone except his ex-wife. In New York, there is no statute of
limitations in rape cases. But Ivana signed a gag order in the divorce,
which prevents her from talking about her marriage without Trump’s
permission. She also appears to have no interest in pressing charges.
Her recent memoir, “Raising Trump,” does not mention the incident (or
any overtly negative story about her ex-husband, for that matter). Some
of Trump’s accusers describe acts that could have fallen under New
York’s definition of “forcible touching,” a Class A misdemeanor; the
statute of limitations for that crime is two years. Stoynoff’s
Mar-a-Lago story could meet Florida’s definition of battery; that
offense has a four-year statute of limitations in the state. In any
case, it’s difficult, to put it mildly, to imagine a prosecutor who
would be able and willing to bring these charges against the President.
In 2015, Cyrus
Vance,
the Manhattan District Attorney who was just reëlected—he ran
unopposed—chose not to bring charges against Weinstein, despite having
audio of Weinstein admitting to sexual misconduct, as well as testimony
from his alleged victim, the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had
reported the crime the day it occurred. The decision was rooted “in the
difference between a case against an ordinary person accused of a sex
crime and a person like Harvey
Weinstein,”
Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote recently. The distance between an ordinary
person and a President—one who happens to be Donald Trump, a man
vindictive enough to cut off medical benefits to his nephew’s seriously
ill young
son in the middle of a dispute about family inheritance—is wider still.

There is a single ongoing piece of litigation against the President, a
civil defamation suit lodged by Summer Zervos, the former “Apprentice”
contestant, who alleges that Trump “aggressively” kissed her, groped
her, and thrust his genitals at her. Zervos is represented by Gloria
Allred, the famous women’s-rights attorney, whom I profiled last
month.
(Allred’s California firm, Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, is working in
partnership with the New York law firm Cuti Hecker Wang.) Allred, who
has spent much of her forty-one-year career defending victims of sexual
assault and harassment—she also represents thirty-three of Bill
Cosby’s
nearly sixty accusers—held a press conference with Zervos shortly before
Trump’s Inauguration. “Enough is enough,” she said. “Truth matters.
Women matter. Those who allege they were victims of sexual misconduct or
sexual assault by Mr. Trump matter.” One of her court filings in
Zervos’s lawsuit lists seventeen statements made by Trump during the
campaign in an attempt to discredit his accusers’ stories: the women
were telling “false allegations and outright lies,” he said; their
stories were “100% fabricated and made-up”; Zervos “wishes she could
still be on reality TV.”

Zervos is asking for three thousand dollars in damages, a sign that the
lawsuit is not financially motivated; the goal is a systematic
reëngagement with the truth about Trump’s sexual misdeeds. Her lawyers
have filed a wide-ranging subpoena that seeks all records from the Trump
camp concerning any accusations of sexual misbehavior made during the
campaign, as well as anything related to statements made by Trump
himself on the “Access Hollywood” tape. (Trump maintains that he was
engaging in “locker-room
talk,”
and that every woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct is lying.)
Trump has attempted to get the case dismissed through a variety of
arguments—that it was a matter of “political
opinion”
when he said his accusers were liars, that a sitting President can’t be
sued in state court. A judge is expected to rule on whether the
subpoena’s discovery will be granted, and whether the case can proceed
to the New York State Supreme Court in the relatively near future, possibly
before the end of the year. Zervos, for her part, has refrained from
speaking to the media since the Inauguration.

Why aren’t there more civil lawsuits? Why aren’t Trump’s accusers
dominating the news cycle with harrowing op-eds? Here again, Weinstein’s
case is illuminating. Ronan Farrow’s latest
piece details the sickening array of options available to Weinstein in his
yearlong project to coerce and discredit the actresses and journalists
who hoped to articulate the story of his behavior: there were multiple
private investigation firms and spies of all kinds in play. Weinstein’s
case is different from Trump’s in crucial ways, of course: our President
is not accused of orchestrating a complex undercover campaign to harass
and threaten his sexual-assault accusers. (Although, after he called
them liars at his campaign rallies, a vocal fraction of his political
supporters have been happy to do that on their own.) Still, at a time
when a Hollywood producer is hiring ex-Mossad agents to go after alleged
rape victims—a time when, Weinstein stories notwithstanding, multiple
press outlets have been hounded, threatened, and even exterminated by
the wealthy and vengeful—it would take an astonishing amount of courage
to continually reiterate a sexual-assault claim against the volatile and
virtually invulnerable President of the United States.

It seems almost cruel to wish, at this point, that these women would
keep speaking. They already did. They told the public that Trump grabbed
them and groped them. They gave the details of where and when; they
spoke about how it had affected them. A poll last October found that
sixty-eight per cent of registered voters believed their stories. Only
fourteen per cent believed that Trump had not made unwanted sexual
advances toward women. So it’s not that we didn’t hear Trump’s
accusers, or even that we didn’t believe them. We knew that they weren’t
lying, and we elected him anyway. Our response when victims speak up now
has to be shaped by the magnitude of that failure.