Truth-Telling in a Time of Erosion: What E. Jean Carroll Teaches Us About Bearing Witness

"When power laughs at harm, silence becomes complicity. Naming the truth is not just resistance—it’s repair." - Mary Coughlin

Opening Ground (Regulation & Consent)

Before we dive in, take a breath. This post includes references to sexual violence, institutional betrayal, and misogyny. If now is not the right time for you, please know it will be here when you are ready.

You are not alone. You are not overreacting. You are not imagining things.

Naming the Harm

E. Jean Carroll’s memoir, Not My Type, is not just an account of personal trauma—it’s an indictment of a national culture that rewards cruelty, erases survivors, and weaponizes power.

Her story is searing and specific—and yet devastatingly familiar to so many women in this country. She names her harm. She names her assailant. And then, for her bravery, she is ridiculed, belittled, and dismissed—by a man who would go on to lead the nation, and by millions willing to look the other way.

This is not about one predator. It is about a pervasive, normalized misogyny that lives in our courtrooms, news cycles, algorithms, legislatures, and family dinner tables. It’s about the trauma of being a woman in a nation that treats womanhood as disposable, deniable, and debatable.

A National Indictment, Broadcast in Plain Sight

Let us not forget: in 2005, Donald Trump said, on tape, that he could grab women inappropriately because of his fame—and “they let you do it.” The specific language was vulgar, degrading, and disturbingly casual. But worse, it was a confession—an admission of non-consensual sexual contact spoken with smug entitlement.

What followed was not accountability, but elevation. He was elected president after that tape aired. Millions shrugged, minimized, or justified it. That moment wasn’t just offensive—it was a national reckoning we refused to face.

It asked: Do we believe women? Do we value consent? Do we hold the powerful accountable?
And the answer, echoed in silence and applause alike, was: not enough.

A Trauma-Informed Lens on Systemic Misogyny

To be trauma-informed is to understand that harm doesn’t live only in the moment of violence. It lives in the aftermath—how stories are received, how systems respond, how survivors are silenced or gaslit or forced to relive their trauma just to be believed.

Carroll’s experience is a case study in institutional betrayal:

• A culture that makes a joke of assault.

• A media ecosystem that questions survivors more than perpetrators.

• A political machine that uses denial as a campaign strategy.

This is what trauma looks like at scale. This is trauma as public policy, trauma as branding, trauma as political theater.

Where B.U.F.F.E.R. Meets Misogyny

The B.U.F.F.E.R. framework offers a map for responding to trauma—not just in the NICU, but in every room where power and vulnerability meet. Let’s walk through it in this context:

• Belonging: Misogyny thrives in exclusion. Women are told their stories don’t count, their pain isn’t valid, their bodies are not their own. To restore belonging is to say: You are not alone. Your truth matters. You are seen, not silenced.

• Understanding: A trauma-informed response resists judgment and seeks context. Why don’t more survivors come forward? Because they’ve learned it is often more dangerous to speak than to stay silent. Understanding replaces “Why didn’t she?” with “Of course she didn’t. And I still believe her.”

• Forgiveness (of self, not the perpetrator): Many survivors carry shame that was never theirs. The internalized guilt, the second-guessing, the years of silence. Forgiveness, here, means releasing the lie that it was ever your fault.

• Frameworks: We need systems that protect rather than retraumatize. Policies that affirm bodily autonomy. Media ethics that prioritize truth over spectacle. Justice systems that understand the neurobiology of trauma. B.U.F.F.E.R. doesn’t just name values—it demands structures that embody them.

• Equanimity: Holding steady in the face of rage, grief, and injustice is not weakness—it is radical resilience. Equanimity allows us to stay grounded, to not lose ourselves as we bear witness to the unraveling.

• Respect: True respect isn’t just politeness. It is the full honoring of another’s humanity. It refuses to see survivors as liabilities. It refuses to let power go unchecked. It respects the act of truth-telling as sacred.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Reading Not My Type can leave you feeling gutted. Furious. Triggered. But also clear. Because now we cannot say we didn’t know. And in that clarity, we find responsibility.

To be trauma-informed in this era is to stop pretending this is normal.
To stop making peace with misogyny because it wears a suit or wins elections.
To stop saying “That’s just how he is” when what we mean is “He harmed someone and got away with it.”

Closing Words

Trauma doesn’t end when the assault ends. It continues in every unspoken truth, every disbelieved story, every law that tells women they are not credible, not capable, not sovereign.

But healing begins when someone speaks. When someone listens. When someone stays.
E. Jean Carroll spoke. And for those of us still healing from our own silencing, she handed us something rare: a mirror, a megaphone, and a map.

This is not just a time of remembering.
It is a time of reckoning.
And still—perhaps—of repair.

With fire in my belly and a refusal to forget,
Mary

P.S.: If you're ready to move beyond awareness into embodied action—to become a practitioner who sees, holds, and transforms trauma at every level—you’re ready for TIP.
Become a Trauma-Informed Professional and be the one who changes the room.