This week the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has been sitting in a courtroom at 100 Center St. in New York, where adult film actor Stormy Daniels is testifying in Donald Trump’s criminal trial, including recounting the sexual encounter she had with him in a hotel room at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Daniels’ testimony, which continues Thursday, has been the kind of history-making, norms-crushing, mind-bending scene Americans have grown inured to. On Tuesday, sitting about 10 feet away from Trump, Daniels testified: “There was an imbalance of power, for sure. but I was not threatened verbally or physically.” That imbalance was, at least for a few hours, tipped against Trump.
As a feminist, I was struck by just how deeply ironic it was to watch the man who ended millions of American women’s reproductive freedom face the woman whom he paid to silence. The list of allegations of Trump’s using his fame, wealth and status to impose himself on women is as long as it is lurid. More than a dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct; unsurprisingly, he has denied all the claims. Last year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan store in the mid-1990s. And, of course, there’s Trump’s boast on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
At that moment, Trump was just a criminal defendant like all other criminal defendants and not the onetime leader of the free world.
It was unsurprising then that as president, Trump laid the groundwork for the rollback of women’s autonomy. His three Supreme Court appointments were essential to ending the federal right to abortion. In Idaho, women are being airlifted out of state because doctors refused to save their lives. In Louisiana, a New Orleans public radio station reports, doctors are “delaying routine prenatal care” until the second trimester out of fear of being prosecuted for miscarriages. And Trump’s administration halted collection of data on equal pay and weakened Title IX protections.
In and out of office, then, overpowering women seems to be a theme for Trump. But this week, for a brief moment, the power dynamic was reversed, and Daniels had the opportunity to speak to the jurors and the judge and whoever else was sitting in the courtroom. She was able to tell the jury about Trump’s putting himself between her and the exit. She was able to share that afterward she was “shaking” and felt “ashamed that I didn’t stop it, that I didn’t say no.” For hours, Daniels held the room’s attention. Trump was president once, and he might be again in the future, but this time, Daniels was in control.
And Trump knew it. According to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, when Trump told Daniels that he and his wife, Melania, “don’t even sleep in the same room,” the former president “shook his head and muttered something to his legal team. ... He appears increasingly irritated as she testifies.” But his displeasure didn’t matter. At that moment, Trump was just a criminal defendant like all other criminal defendants and not the onetime leader of the free world.
We know that if Trump gets back into office, those likely to staff his administration plan to use the Comstock Act, an 1873 chastity law, to make mailing abortion pills illegal. We also know that many on the right hope to push federal legislation that would make embryos people and regulate IVF. Trump, his would-be bureaucratic lackeys and the judges he has installed are ready to further tip the scales of justice against all women, including Stormy Daniels.
But not this time. This time, Daniels was able to tell her story, just like E. Jean Carroll before her. We talk so much about the guardrails holding in our political system, and sometimes it seems very clear that they aren’t holding. But this week in court, Stormy Daniels is able to tell her story, Donald Trump doesn’t get special treatment, and the wheels of justice can grind on.