"Shocking as it sounds, I thought it would help him. And shocking as it sounds, I was correct... because it is a masculine, powerful, leader-like thing to do to take what you want, to have as many women for your own pleasure as you can take."

Says E. Jean Carroll, speaking on the NYT "Daily" podcast, answering the question why she did not tell her story before the 2016 election.

I strongly recommend listening to the entire podcast. We hear Carroll tell her version of the story, and we hear the 2 women who received phone calls from Carroll shortly after the alleged incident. One, Lisa Birnbach (the author of "The Official Preppy Handbook"), says that Carroll laughed as she recounted her story and that Birnbach had to tell her that it was rape and wanted to take her to the police right away.  The other woman, Carol Martin, says she told Carroll that Trump had a lot of lawyers, that there would be no end of trouble if she were to make an accusation of rape, that she should tell no one, and that she'd be better off getting on with her life. If the incident and the 2 conversations took place as the 3 women describe, then it's clear that Carroll — who is herself a big advice columnist — took the second woman's advice.

E. Jean Carroll continues to say that she does not regard what happened as rape. She tells a story in which she was having a fun time interacting with Trump and she willingly and laughingly rode up the elevator with him at Bergdorf's on his idea that she help him shop for lingerie. She had her ideas of how the scene would play out and, as she tells it, imagined getting him to put on the lingerie. In her telling of the story, she was surprised that he got very sexually aggressive as soon as the door to the dressing room closed, but she's clear that she never said anything. Not only didn't she scream for help, in her version of the story, she doesn't say "No," or "Stop," or "Don't." I get the impression — from her words — that she was taken aback that he used absolutely no foreplay and that she thought she had a fantastic story to tell. But the first person she told the story to, Lisa Birnbach, threw cold water on it.

In the podcast, Carroll says this about her refusal to call it rape: "Every woman gets to choose her word. Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is fight. My word is not the victim word. I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought." That made me think of gender diversity and the idea that we humans don't have to accept the conventional categories "male" and "female." There's much more to sex than what the legal system defines and labels "rape." You can tell your own version of the facts (and you can embellish and exaggerate and you can slant and you can lie). If you don't invoke the criminal justice system, you can use the words you want to express yourself. Carroll is notably choosing not to use the word "rape" while describing actions that, legally, are rape. She has her reasons. She's a writer who has written a book that's about a lifetime of sexual encounters, many of which were bad.

Carroll is open to the accusation that she is lying (or crazy), and that's part of speaking publicly. She's also open to a defamation lawsuit. There is criminal law (which she's eschewed) and there is civil law (which she can't opt out of). Will Trump sue her for libel? Or will he just stick to his story that he never knew her and that she's not "his type"? Carroll and Trump are — I think it's fair to say — longtime participants in a NYC scene in which people had a lot of high-spirited sex which they may have enjoyed or suffered from at the time and which they look back on with whatever interpretations they may find. They can talk about it now — including lying about it now — as much as they want.

But what are we supposed to do about it? I do think Trump knew her and is lying to say that he didn't. I suspect that some incident did take place, but Carroll can only tell it through the interpretations that have formed and reformed in her mind over the years. She's writing in what I think is a memoir style, where her own story predominates, and I don't think there's an effort to portray the story as he may have experienced it subjectively. At the time, there was the idea that "no means no" and a decent man had to stop at "no." But the idea of a requirement of "affirmative consent" was just emerging, and even on Carroll's telling of the story, I can see how a man of that time may have felt he had an opportunity and he could take it, indeed, that the masculine, powerful, leader-like thing to do is to take what you want, to have as many women for your own pleasure as you can take.

Birnbach visited some consciousness-raising on Carroll, but Carroll wasn't ready to go there back then. Time has passed, and #MeToo happened, and Carroll did some soul-searching and book-writing. I think that's valuable, but also that it's too late to do anything to Trump about it. He was a bad boyfriend. That's for sure, and that's something we've known about him all along. He didn't claim to be a good boyfriend. He's been open about that, even if he's lying about Carroll now.