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      A woman says Trump groped her in front of Jeffrey Epstein. Will anyone listen? | Moira Donegan

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      Does sexual assault matter politically? Eight years ago, in October of 2016, many people thought that it did. When the Access Hollywood tape was released on 7 October of that year, and audio blared from every cable news channel in which Donald Trump, attempting to impress the celebrity interviewer Billy Bush, bragged that his stardom meant he could grab women “by the pussy”, the incident was, for a moment at least, widely believed to have ended his presidential bid. The clip sparked outrage, condemnation and calls for Trump to drop out of the race – including from sitting Republican governors, senators and representatives. The Republican National Committee suspended support for Trump’s campaign in response to the tape. His political career was widely assumed to be over.It wasn’t. The allegations of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen other women that were made in the days, weeks and years thereafter – including from reporters, models, yoga instructors, Mar-a-Lago regulars, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA contestants, strangers he sat next to on planes, women who worked for him, entrepreneurs, adult film stars, advice columnists and one woman who had the misfortune of attending a Mother’s Day brunch event at a Trump-owned property – did not, either. For all the seriousness and solemnity with which Republican politicians condemned Trump in the days following the release of the Access Hollywood tape – for all their furrowed brows and reverent declarations that alleged sexual assault is no laughing matter – ultimately, the Republican party establishment lined up behind Trump. So did their voters.It might be a sign of how far we have fallen that the political world, this week, barely seemed to notice when the veteran model Stacey Williams came forward to say she was groped by Trump in 1993, while the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – a close friend of Trump’s and Williams’s boyfriend at the time – looked on. Williams’s account mirrors those provided by many of Trump’s other accusers: like them, she seems to have been lewdly groped by Trump, who grabbed her breasts and buttocks in an abrupt and perfunctory fashion. Indeed, what happened to Williams sounds a bit like how Trump himself has described his conduct: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”This time, there were no calls for Donald Trump to drop out of the race; no solemn condemnations; no handwringing over whether Trump’s boorishness, his braying entitlement, or his violent and vulgar treatment of women and girls might disqualify him from the power and supposed honor of the position that he’s seeking. No one bothered to point out that someone who assaults women – let alone someone who does so as routinely and prolifically as Trump is said to have done – does not deserve to be the president. Even the Democrats mostly shrugged.Part of this, to be sure, is because hardly anyone is surprised by Trump anymore. There are few minds most Americans will ever know as intimately as we have all been forced to know Trump’s. We know his narcissism, its surprising pettiness; we know his monumental vanity, his cynicism, his relentless dishonesty; we know the uncanny self-awareness of his humor – though it never, ever comes at his own expense – and we know the compass-like constancy of his devotion to his own short-term self-interest.We even know that he was friends with Epstein, whose predations on underage girl children Trump joked about in an interview with New York Magazine in the 90s. We know, already, how he behaves towards women; we have been shown. We’ve learned not only from the more than two dozen women who have told us, not only from the sworn testimony of Stormy Daniels, not even only from the jury’s verdict in the civil suit for rape and assault that was brought against him, successfully, by the writer E Jean Carroll. We know from watching him, as we have been compelled to do, now, for the better part of a decade.What might be more revealing, then, is what the non-response to Stacey Williams’s story tells us about ourselves. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election – and in direct response to the indignity American women faced when a man who bragged about and was alleged to have serially committed sexual assault was elevated to a position of superlative authority – the #MeToo movement faced a mass public reckoning over sexual violence, and its prevalence and impunity in all sectors of American life.Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two investigative reporters at the New York Times, published their first story about the predations of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein on 5 October 2017 – just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape. For a heady moment, powerful men who did the kinds of things Trump has been accused of – and has bragged about doing – were losing their positions of dignity and power as a result. Even Republican politicians were not immune: Roy Moore, a far-right Republican Senate candidate, lost his election in no less a deep-red state than Alabama after nine women accused him of sexual misconduct against them while he was in his 30s and they were in their teens.Many solemn declarations were made then, too: about the long-overdue reckoning, the pain of survivors, the need to reconsider sexual scripts, the eroticization of inequality, and the ways inequality had been weaponized to demean women and keep them from public life. All of this proceeded while Trump sat in the Oval Office. None of it could touch him: everyone presumed he was immune from any accountability for the way he treated women, and he was.Maybe other men are now, too. The #MeToo movement was a large and internally fractious movement, but if it can be said to have had a singular goal, it might have been this: to resolve our culture’s cognitive dissonance about sexual violence. For decades, the world operated on a kind of grim hypocrisy: everyone – from the law to the HR department, from Hollywood to your weekend hobby group – professed to abhor sexual violence, to take it maximally seriously. But, in practice, sexual violence was not taken very seriously at all: the incidents were minimized, the prevalence was shrugged off, the victims were blamed, demonized and smeared as vindictive or hysterical for ever bringing it up.Everyone said they hated sexual violence and that they thought it mattered; most people acted as if they thought it didn’t. The goal of #MeToo could be said to bring actions into line with words: to make people behave as if they thought sexual violence was as wrong as they said it was. Instead, it may have resolved the cognitive dissonance in the other direction: now people admit that they care very little about sexual violence. Their actions, I suppose, finally match their words.Before the Guardian broke Williams’s story, there was a flutter of rumors about an impending accusation on social media. These were flamed by Mark Halperin, a onetime political journalist, who took to his YouTube show on Wednesday to say that he had been pitched a story about Trump that “could end” the former president’s campaign. Halperin’s supposed story never materialized, and maybe that’s to be expected: he would have been an odd choice for such a leak. After all, his own career was derailed during the #MeToo movement, when he was accused by five women of sexual misconduct and harassment – including groping of exactly the sort that Williams says Donald Trump subjected her to. He still felt comfortable shilling a possible sexual violence story anyway, despite his own history. Probably, he assumed no one would bring it up.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

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      The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Gender is going to be a huge factor in this election. Here’s what the data shows | Celinda Lake and Cate Gormley

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      The election for president ends in under a month, and voters in states across the country have begun casting early ballots. As we face what is shaping up to be the third presidential election that will come down to just tens of thousands of votes across a handful of key states, female voters, their concerns, and their judgments of the candidates will be decisive in the election.Polling shows that the gender gap, which we have seen in every presidential election since 1980, is at a record high. The gender gap, defined as the difference between the vote margin among women and the vote margin among men between Democrats and Republicans, is the key to success for Kamala Harris and other Democrats – they need to win women by more than they lose men.Recent polling varies, but these polls all demonstrate a significant gender gap. A Quinnipiac University poll from September shows a 26-point gender gap: women favor Harris 53% to 41% for Donald Trump, a 12-point advantage, while men favor Trump 54% to 40% for a 14-point advantage. A Suffolk University poll from August of likely voters shows a 34-point gender gap, with women supporting Harris 57% to 36% for Trump for a 21-point margin and men supporting Trump 51% to 38% for Harris for a 13-point margin. And an Echelon Insights poll in September also found a 10-point gender gap, with women favoring Harris 54% to 43% for Trump for an 11-point advantage and men 49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.Women and men are making different calculations as they plan to vote, and what drives these intentions are their most important issues and their perceptions of the candidates. Since the US supreme court ruled that states can ban abortion, abortion has been a top voting issue for female voters, especially younger women. In swing state polling conducted by the New York Times/Siena College in August, the economy and inflation are men’s most important issue in deciding their vote. For women, abortion and the economy and inflation are tied as the most important issues, and for women under age 45, abortion is the single most important voting issue.In a poll we conducted this spring on behalf of Intersections of Our Lives, a reproductive justice collaborative, we found that Black, Latina/x, and Asian American and Pacific Islander female voters think it is important for Congress to address every reproductive health and abortion issue we tested. Women of color have an expansive reproductive health agenda that includes addressing high rates of maternal mortality among women of color; ensuring access to birth control; ensuring that abortion is legal, affordable and accessible; ensuring that medication abortion is available to all women no matter where they live; and protecting IVF and other fertility treatments.In a survey of unmarried women under age 55 that we conducted for PSG Consulting and Innovating for the Public Good, we found that younger unmarried women are worried about losing basic rights and freedoms like access to reproductive health care, and they believe that this issue is more likely to be addressed if Democrats control Congress and the White House.Abortion is a major issue this election, and abortion and a female candidate on the ticket can mobilize women. According to an analysis by TargetSmart, we already see this mobilization. Since 21 July, when Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, 38 states have updated voter files; voter registration has almost tripled among Black women ages 18-29 and almost doubled among all Black women, and increased 150% among Latina women ages 18-29, relative to the same period in 2020. Democratic registration has increased over 50% compared to 7% for Republicans.It is not just their concerns – female voters see Harris and Trump differently. Earlier this year, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 31% of women thought that Trump respects women “a lot” or “some”. In another recent Quinnipiac University poll, in August, women’s impressions of Harris and Trump diverged significantly. While 58% of women say that Harris is ethical, 64% say Trump is not ethical. Six in 10 (60%) women say Harris cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and 60% say that Trump does not care. A solid majority (57%) say Harris has good leadership skills and 54% say Trump does not. Finally, and maybe most importantly, 69% of women say Harris has the mental fitness to serve a presidential term, and 57% say Trump does not.As Eleanor Roosevelt said long ago: it’s up to the women.

      Celinda Lake is the president of Lake Research Partners

      Cate Gormley is the vice-president of Lake Research Partners More

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      in Elections

      Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for Transgender Woman’s Killing

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      The man, Daqua Lameek Ritter, was the first person in the country to be convicted of a federal hate crime based on gender identity.A South Carolina man who was the first person in the United States to be convicted of a federal hate crime based on gender identity was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday for the killing of a transgender woman in 2019, the authorities said.According to the government, the man, Daqua Lameek Ritter, fatally shot the woman, Dime Doe, after word spread in Allendale, S.C., that the two were in a sexual relationship. Mr. Ritter had pleaded not guilty but was convicted of a hate crime in the murder of Ms. Doe by a jury in February 2024.Adair Ford Boroughs, the U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina, said in a statement on Thursday that “from the smallest of communities, like Allendale, to anywhere in South Carolina where hate and injustice occur,” civil rights must be protected.“We will continue to fight for the rights of those targeted because of their race, their religion, their gender identity or sexual orientation, or their ability,” Ms. Boroughs said.In a sentencing memo, lawyers for Mr. Ritter requested that he not spend life in prison. The Associated Press reported that prosecutors had asked for a life sentence without parole, based on federal sentencing guidelines.Lawyers listed in court documents for Mr. Ritter did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday evening.According to prosecutors, Mr. Ritter, who is from New York City, spent time in Allendale while visiting his grandmother and became close with Ms. Doe, who grew up in the town and worked as a hairdresser. Mr. Ritter sought to keep their relationship secret, court documents said. He did not want his girlfriend or the community to know about it and became “irate” after Ms. Doe publicized it, according to the documents.Many of his friends mocked him, and witnesses said that Mr. Ritter threatened to harm Ms. Doe as a result, according to court documents. Mr. Ritter eventually lured Ms. Doe to a remote area in Allendale and shot her three times in the head, prosecutors said. Afterward, he burned the clothes he had worn during the crime, disposed of the murder weapon and repeatedly lied to investigators, according to federal prosecutors.Mr. Ritter’s lawyers argued that there were inconsistencies in the government’s case. But after several hours of deliberation, a jury found Mr. Ritter guilty of Ms. Doe’s murder. He was also convicted of obstructing justice and using a firearm in connection with the killing.Transgender people are four times as likely to experience violence, including rape and sexual assault, according to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.Federal officials have previously prosecuted hate crimes based on gender identity, but Mr. Ritter’s case was the first in the country to make it to trial in which someone was charged with a hate crime based on gender identity, officials said. More

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      in Elections

      Under Trump, U.S. Prisons Offered Gender-Affirming Care

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      The Trump administration’s approach is notable in light of a campaign ad that slams Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and migrants.A campaign ad released by former President Donald J. Trump in battleground states slams Vice President Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and migrants, concluding: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”But the Trump administration’s record on providing services for transgender people in the sprawling federal prison system, which houses thousands of undocumented immigrants awaiting trial or deportation, is more nuanced than the 30-second spot suggests.Trump appointees at the Bureau of Prisons, a division of the Justice Department, provided an array of gender-affirming treatments, including hormone therapy, for a small group of inmates who requested it during Mr. Trump’s four years in office.In a February 2018 budget memo to Congress, bureau officials wrote that under federal law, they were obligated to pay for a prisoner’s “surgery” if it was deemed medically necessary. Still, legal wrangling delayed the first such operation until 2022, long after Mr. Trump left office.“Transgender offenders may require individual counseling and emotional support,” officials wrote. “Medical care may include pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., cross-gender hormone therapy), hair removal and surgery (if individualized assessment indicates surgical intervention is applicable).”The statement, in part, reflected guidelines that officials in the Obama administration released shortly before they left office in January 2017, which were geared at ensuring “transgender inmates can access programs and services that meet their needs.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?

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      Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      In the US, rats could soon have better birth control access than women | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The fight for rat-productive rightsEric Adams, we recently learned, seems to have spent the bulk of his time as mayor of New York trying to wangle criminally cheap business class tickets from Turkish Airlines. But while Adams may have made history by becoming the first sitting mayor of New York to be indicted on federal corruption charges, the fact that he has a slightly wonky moral compass is old news. Even before being appointed mayor, there were questions about Adam’s truthfulness, including a long-running debate about whether the swagger-obsessed candidate lived in Brooklyn, as he insisted he did, or New Jersey.Still, let’s give the mayor his due, shall we? It would be unfair to say he’s spent the entirety of his time in high office trying to live the high life. Adams, who appointed New York City’s first “rat tsar” last year, has also spent a lot of time thinking about the city’s rodent problem. “I don’t think there’s been a mayor in history that says how much he hates rats,” he grandly proclaimed during New York City’s inaugural Rat Summit in September. “I dislike rats.” Adams added that he was confident New York could “look forward to a new paradigm in urban rat management”.Wheelie bins are part of that exciting new paradigm in urban rat management. There was much mirth on social media over the summer when it transpired that New York City had paid McKinsey over a million dollars to figure out whether it might be a good idea to put loose rubbish in a bin. (Or, in management consultant speech, “containerize” it.) Now the brainiacs in Adams’s orbit have come up with an exciting new paradigm shift: the city council recently greenlit pilot schemes to deploy ContraPest, a type of rodent birth control.The irony that New York is investing in rodent contraceptives at a time when women’s access to reproductive services across the US is under fire hasn’t gone unnoticed. Social media has been filled with wry observations along the lines of “it’s easier to get reproductive rights as a rodent in New York than it is for a woman to get reproductive rights in most of the country”.Because pedants never take a day off I will note that quip isn’t strictly true. At least for the moment it isn’t. But if Donald Trump wins the election and the extremists backing him have their way then it might very well be true that rats will soon have better access to birth control in the US than women. Over the past few years, rightwingers have started to speak more openly about the possibility of banning birth control. In 2022, for example, an Idaho Republican leader suggested he’d consider banning certain forms of birth control, including the morning-after pill. Around the same time the governor of Mississippi refused to rule out future contraception bans during an interview on NBC.This isn’t just all talk. Over the years the right has managed to undermine access to birth control in a number of alarming ways. In 2022, for example, an appeals court ruled that federally funded family planning centers in Texas must receive parental consent before prescribing birth control to teenagers. (Previously federal courts had found that the national title X program guaranteed minors the right to access birth control without parental involvement.) Then, this summer Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have recognized a legal right to contraception.Perhaps most importantly, anti-abortion activists have also been doggedly trying to argue that certain birth control methods, such as Plan B and certain intrauterine devices (IUDs), are abortifacients because they may prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs. While it’s unlikely that we’ll see any sort of direct push to outlaw access to contraceptives, expect to see anti-abortion laws sneakily widen to restrict access to birth control. As advocates have noted, Roe was not toppled in a day–and access to contraceptives won’t be overturned imminently. But anti-abortion extremists have made clear what their endgame is. And when these people tell you who they are, you’d better believe them.‘I’ve never worn trousers up a mountain, and I never will’I find cycling in a dress awkward. Meanwhile, Cecilia Llusco, one of Bolivia’s first female Indigenous mountain climbers, scales icy peaks in a pollera: a traditional voluminous floral skirt. Don’t miss this wonderful Guardian feature on the Cholita climbers of Bolivia–it has some incredible photographs.Melania Trump wants you to know she is passionately pro-choiceIn her new memoir the former first lady writes, “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body.” Good question Melania! Ever tried asking your husband that? Speaking of which, Melania’s decision to speak out about abortion rights a month before the election feels part of a calculated strategy by the Trump campaign to soften its rhetoric on abortion.Prominent Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini killed in an Israeli airstrikeWafa was killed alongside her husband, her five-year-old daughter and her seven-month-old son. As Reporters Without Borders recently noted: “At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed.”India’s government thinks criminalizing marital rape would be “excessively harsh”One in 25 women in India have faced sexual violence from their husbands, the BBC reports. And, of course, nothing happens to most of these men because marital rape is not a criminal offence in India. For years now, campaigners have been petitioning India’s supreme court to try and change this but have faced enormous resistance from the government, religious groups, and men’s rights activists. An affidavait submitted by India’s Interior Ministry on Thursday argued criminalizing marital rape “may seriously impact the conjugal relationship and may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage.” It also said that while a man “does not have any fundamental right to violate the consent of his wife” including marital rape under anti-rape laws would be “excessively harsh” and “disproportionate”.Mexico’s first woman president announces reforms to battle gender discriminationOn her second full day in office, Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had proposed reforms to broaden women’s rights, including a constitutional guarantee of equal pay for equal work.EU court rules gender and nationality enough to grant Afghan women asylumAn important ruling by the European court of justice recognizes Afghan women as a persecuted group.The week in podtriarchyIn 2012 Melania Trump famously posted a photo of a smiling beluga whale with the caption “what is she thinking?” Despite the fact that entire podcast episodes have been devoted to this question, we still don’t know. Scientists have recently discovered, however, that bottlenose dolphins ‘smile’ at each other to communicate during social play. The open-mouth expression is meant to signal fun and avoid conflict. So, in other words, dolphins have better social skills than many politicians. More

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      in Elections

      JD Smirks His Way Into the Future

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      When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called “Weakness” against Nikki Haley, a hawk.)The ad’s subtext is clearly gender, trying to exploit Kamala’s problems winning over Black and white working-class men.In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing — a lot better than Trump does — and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More