 | | The Times reporter Megan Twohey in the studio, after she spoke with E. Jean Carroll and her two friends. Michael Barbaro/The New York Times | |
| Michael Barbaro |
| In the fall of 2016, a woman named Jessica Leeds wrote an email to The Times, claiming that, decades earlier, Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her during a flight. The email was forwarded to my colleague Megan Twohey and me, and we set about trying to report the story. Trump would later deny the allegations. |
| In our reporting, Megan and I were struck by Jessica's explanation for why she did not report the alleged assault to any authorities or airport employees at the time. She was a working woman in a man's world. Unwanted advances were a fact of life. |
| "We accepted it for years," Jessica said of the conduct. "We were taught it was our fault." |
| But Jessica did tell her friends and family — not right away, but well before she had contacted us. We reached out to them, one by one, to confirm the details she had conveyed to them, and cross-referenced those details. |
| They were not witnesses, but the conversations they had with Jessica gave readers a new way to assess the credibility of her accusations, something Megan and I discussed on an episode of "The Run-Up" podcast a few weeks before the 2016 election. |
| Three years later, as Megan reported on the accusations of E. Jean Carroll, who claimed that she, too, had been sexually assaulted by Trump, she sought out the same kind of accounts from friends. Megan found two of them. At first, they spoke anonymously. But by Wednesday morning, Megan had persuaded them to speak on the record, using their names. |
| We typically time our episodes with the publication of articles by our colleagues. This was different. The news would be made on the show. |
| E. Jean and her two friends, Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach, told their story on "The Daily." The result was a powerful conversation about assault, memory, friendship and a bygone era in New York that all three women had inhabited. |
| At the end of my interview with Megan, both of us realized we were thinking back to the same story we had worked on years earlier, about Jessica Leeds. Like Jessica, E. Jean did not report her allegations to the authorities. Like Jessica, E. Jean had experienced unwanted touching from men before. And like Jessica, she was inclined, at first, to blame herself, not the men she said had assaulted her. |
| But over time, the world changed, and so did they. And these two women decided they had to tell their stories. |
| Talk to Michael on Twitter: @mikiebarb. |
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