Will we ever hold Trump accountable for the 17 allegations of sexual misconduct against him?

On the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape released shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump bragged that he could grope and assault women because he was a celebrity. His own claims in the tape were bolstered by the claims of a number of women that Trump had sexually assaulted them. At the time, many, myself included, thought that these revelations would sink his campaign. Instead, he still won the election, launched to victory in no small part by securing just under 50 percent of white women’s votes.

Recently, NBC News unearthed footage of Donald Trump that could have reignited a conversation around Trump’s behavior. This video showed Trump at a party decades ago with Jeffrey Epstein, who was recently charged with sex trafficking. But this recent tape did as little to make the public seriously consider the claims of the now 17 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct and/or assault as did the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Our country’s failure to hold our own president accountable for these alleged actions only serves to reinforce the normalization of sexual misconduct among men across the nation — and even go so far as to garner sympathy for them over their victims. 

In recent years, feminist philosopher Kate Manne coined the term “himpathy” to describe the “excessive or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male agent or wrongdoer over his female victim.” Himpathy is the perversion of sympathy, the belief that rapists are victimized by their victims speaking truth to power. It is the motivation of those who brazenly defend Donald Trump on the basis that his misogynistic utterances are just “locker room” talk and don’t necessarily mean he acted inappropriately.

In her memoir The Reckonings, writer Lacy Johnson details her rape, kidnapping, and near-death experience at the hand of her rapist. She writes that speaking about rape is impossible without speaking about the silence that rapists and systems built to protect rapists instill in their victims. This systematic silencing is propped up by tangential untruths: that rape is “an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable.” That it is (conveniently) perpetrated by bad apples, not a crime rooted in historical systems of patriarchy meant to forcibly subjugate and degrade women on a grand scale. 

As president, Trump and his administration have attempted to codify silencing sexual assault survivors into law. Not only has Trump discredited more than a dozen women who have personally accused him of assaulting them, but his administration has silenced survivors on a systemic level by gutting Title IX, bolstering defendants’ rights in cases of campus sexual assault, and removing liability from schools for sexual assault on their campuses. 

The #MeToo movement, despite its flaws, has been an antidote to the silence which is expected of survivors. In fact, the women who bravely spoke out about their experiences as part of this movement were hailed as the “Silence Breakers” by Time magazine, which honored them collectively as their “Person of the Year” in 2017. 

But it seems the attempts of Trump’s accusers to break their silence have yet to break through to the public in the same way. Comprised of a diverse group of pageant participants, an Apprentice contestant, a receptionist, acquaintances, and, most recently, acclaimed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, these women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct are so threatening to Trump that he vowed to sue “all of these liars,” presumably to squelch their speech and to further discredit their experiences. 

It’s also debatable whether any of the “silence breakers” have truly made the public believe that rape is inexcusable. After all, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence indicating that Trump is a serial assaulter, yet he has still by and large avoided punishment for these alleged crimes. Rather, his victims have been punished for speaking out against him. For example, Carroll has received death threats and now stays offline to avoid social media bile; in an interview with The Guardian, she revealed that she now sleeps with a loaded gun out of fear of violent retribution. 

Of course, this treatment is not reserved just for those whose assailants are high-profile, powerful people. Victims have long been, and continue to be, blamed for reporting the crime committed against them more harshly than their alleged perpetrators are punished for committing it. The justice system is historically unkind to victims of sexual assault. If a report isn’t laughed off by the police entirely, or the victim’s silence not bought by a nondisclosure agreement, any evidence to support their case is often shelved, not used in trails, or lazily not tested at all. Hundreds of thousands of kits remain untested in a so-called rape kit backlog, representing lost opportunities for survivors to seek justice. 

It seems, therefore, that no amount of evidence can undo the systematic discrediting of survivors. Even in the rare instances when seemingly unequivocal evidence is presented in court or in a Title IX office, it is often brushed aside as hearsay or potentially damaging for the perpetrator. Persuasive, objective evidence can be swept aside by simply saying that the perpetrators came from a good family — the rape in question was merely an aberration and not reflective of who this promising young man may become. The fear of ruining perpetrators’ lives too often takes precedence over believing and rehabilitating survivors. And this was true even before the highest halls of government were occupied by an alleged rapist and his cadre of rape apologists.

Donald Trump’s life has yet to be ruined, despite the ever-growing preponderance of evidence that he is, indeed, the sexual predator that he revealed himself to be in the Access Hollywood tape. Seeing him remain in power is an all-too-familiar feeling for every survivor of sexual assault who has spoken truth to power and watched, enraged, as their assaulter accrues more and more power, wields that power to guarantee his own impunity, and disempowers any more — because there are always more — survivors from speaking the truth aloud.