By Maryclare Dale | Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — Cassandra Nuñez and her grandmother cast their first ballots in a U.S. presidential election in 2016. She was a first-year college student; her grandmother, a newly minted citizen. They both hoped to elect the first woman president over a man who bragged about grabbing and kissing women at will.
But Donald Trump became president, and it would be nearly seven years before a Trump accuser could press her claims at trial. This week, jurors in a New York civil case said they believed that Trump sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room in the 1990s — making him the first U.S. president found liable by a jury in a sexual battery case. The panel awarded her $5 million in damages.
“It’s a victorious moment, but why did the people of the United States let this happen?” said Nuñez, now 25, of Los Angeles, noting the number of sexual misconduct accusations against Trump during the campaign and since his election. “It’s kind of late.”
The verdict — a rare moment of accountability for a former president and powerful men like him — comes as women across the U.S. ponder the cultural landscape amid sweeping threats to their hard-won progress, including Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016, the Supreme Court’s repeal of abortion rights last year and the uneven success of the #MeToo movement.
Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA, called it an ambiguous time for women.
“It’s very hard to feel at this moment that the accounting, the reckoning that we need has yet happened,” she said. “I feel this is a small step in the right direction.”
Some may find “yet another day contemplating the behavior of Donald Trump just feels like a colossal waste of attention,” Williams said. But she believes it’s important to address “the everyday abuses of power that have real consequences for victims.”
With a string of investigations swirling around Trump,…
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