A recent New York Times analysis even revealed that those seemingly constant camera pans to Swift have amounted to less than 25 seconds of airtime each week, and these are three-plus-hour broadcasts. And her name is barely mentioned by announcers, if at all.
"Football is awesome, it turns
out," Swift told Time Magazine. "I've been missing out my whole life." Maybe some of her fans will end up feeling the same way.
The most famous woman in the world
has essentially shown up as a guest star on Season 6 of a successful
television series, has barely delivered a single line, and is all anyone
can talk about.
"You did that shit!" a fan yelled at Swift
after the Chiefs-Ravens game. Swift, who does lots of shit, but not any
shit relating to this football game, responded graciously: "I didn’t do
anything!"
To root for the Chiefs is to root for Reid, Mahomes, and
Kelce, including the fact that they are human beings. All of them have
significant others attend their games, all of whom are liable to do
things like run down to the field to hug them after a big win.
If Taylor makes a halftime show appearance to perform, great. If Kelce continues promoting covid-19 vaccinations, even better. If Taylor endorses Joe Biden, superb. If the Kansas City Chiefs finish second in the SuperBowl, that is their fault, not her fault. If the Kansas City Chiefs win, that is their doing, not her doing.
If you do not want to see her at the game, weigh her appearance against real bad things that happen during a game: a trillion loud annoying commercials, concussions, fractured/broken bones, referees rigging plays, your preferred team losing, bad music selected for halftime, endless gambling ads, overbearing/shitty play-by-play announcers, etc. That is the risk you take when you watch the game, shit you like and shit you don't like happens, with many surprises in between.
Taylor is one of the great surprises, as is Brock Purdy, as is yet another Superbowl appearance for Andy Reid and Pat Mahomes.
If you don't want to see her at the game, fine, then don't watch, change the channel.
I turned off Trump's speeches and read them later.
Turn off the Superbowl and read EPSN's play by play later.
In Arizona, where Hispanic voters make up
25% of eligible voters, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego's campaign has
already expressed an intense interest in activating Latinos to historic
levels in his bid to win the seat held by independent Sen. Kyrsten
Sinema.
The importance of the Arizona
Senate race is unquestioned, as it will be one of the closest in the
nation and could decide partisan control of the country.
But
with Sinema's run for re-election uncertain, where does Republican
candidate Kari Lake fall when it comes to Hispanic voters who could
serve as kingmakers in the tight contest?
The
former local broadcast TV mainstay who fiercely aligned with former
president Donald Trump in her losing bid for governor in 2022, while
embracing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election, did well with
Latinos that year compared to Republican Blake Masters who lost his
Senate race to Sen. Mark Kelly.
While Masters lost with Hispanics 58% to 40% according to exit polls, Lake only trailed now-Governor Katie Hobbs 51% to 47%.
While
Arizona politicos stress that Kelly is the most popular elected
official in the state, it is clear that Lake has an opportunity with
Latino voters, one her campaign embraced when asked by The Messenger.
"Kari
Lake is married to a Hispanic, her kids are Hispanic, there's no
question she knows and values the contributions of the Hispanic
community to our state and country," a campaign aide said, arguing that
Latinos are a growing force in Arizona politics that believe deeply in
hard work, safe communities, family, and faith — values it says align
far more with Republicans than with an "extreme" Democrat like Gallego.
"Arizona Hispanics don't want an open
border. Arizona Hispanics don't want their businesses taxed to death.
They don't like attacks from the Biden DOJ on Catholics. And they don't
want their little boys turned into little girls," the Lake campaign
continued. "Hispanics are smart, they see what radical leftists like
Ruben are doing, and a lot of them are waking up to the damage those
policies are doing to their country and their families."
A Gallego spokesperson similarly sought to paint Lake as the extreme candidate in the race.
"Ruben
Gallego is the son of immigrants who was raised by a single mom
alongside his three sisters, went on to serve his country in the
Marines, and has spent the last decade delivering for Arizonans,
including our immigrant and border communities," the campaign said.
"Kari Lake, meanwhile, wants to ban abortion, sow doubt in our
elections, and endanger our Dreamers. The choice for who will best
represent the values and priorities of Latino voters — and all voters —
could not be more clear."
Still,
Tomas Robles, an organizer and Democratic operative for 14 years in
Arizona who has worked to mobilize Latino voters said a lane for Lake
with Hispanics "absolutely" exists.
"I
think it all comes down to visibility and name recognition, people tend
to forget that despite her Trump-like persona, she was a fixture on
local network news for 30 years," he said. While Lake holds extreme
positions, Robles said it is a mistake to believe "that because she
sounds like Trump, people will dismiss her like Trump."
He
argued that a controversy from last week where Lake forced the
resignation of the Arizona Republican Party chair Jeff DeWit by
revealing a leaked recording showed him floating a job if she would skip
the Senate race altogether, was horrible in terms of political loyalty,
but might appeal to some.
"It could also
be seen as standing up to the system, non-Latinos, and rich people in
the state," he said. "Her bravado is a thing that could appeal to some
Latino voters."
As the contest unfolds,
established Latino and immigrant rights leaders on the left plan to let
Hispanic voters know about Lake's most incendiary comments, however, to
inform the community beyond any initial interest in hearing what she has
to say.
Lake,
who will take part in a Wednesday town hall on the "Biden border
crisis" hosted by CPAC in Green Valley, Arizona, along with Mercedes
Schlapp, who worked on Latinos for Trump outreach for the Trump
campaign, shared her views on the current state of immigration on CNN on
Saturday.
"[Biden] and his corrupt
administration is aiding and abetting this invasion at our border," she
said, stressing the need to finish the border wall and get National
Guard troops on the border to stop illegal entry into the country. "Then
we need to sort out the 12 million people who are here and in order to
save our homeland, we need to send them back to their homeland, and
start repatriating these people back to their homeland."
That
call for deportations, including young immigrants brought to the
country as children known as Dreamers, was swiftly slammed by Democratic
Latino leaders, including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which
called her comments "xenophobic," with "no place in American politics."
Ray
Collazo, the executive director of UnidosUS Action Fund, the political
arm of the one of the oldest Hispanic civil rights groups in the
country, responded on Twitter saying Lake "wants to implement a mass
deportation program that would cause family separation and economic
chaos," declaring her entire campaign "based on anti-Latino fear
mongering."
Rhetoric of a border
invasion, often favored by Republicans, has previously come under fire
after the terminology was used by Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg
Abbott before the hate crime mass shooting of 23 mostly
Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals at a Walmart in 2019 by a
shooter who said the "attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of
Texas."
For its part, the Gallego campaign is
working on plans to mobilize Hispanic voters at a "historic" level,
advisors say, through a combination of tried and true, but also new
strategies.
"When it comes to Latinos
we're going to do more than anyone has ever done," a source close to the
campaign said. "That means more digital, more mail, and targeting
infrequent Latino voters."
Already the
campaign has held an October Spanish-language townhall in west Phoenix,
plans of which were first reported by The Messenger, and in December
Gallego was a guest judge at the 16th annual Tamale Fest in Yuma County —
which is two-thirds Latino, and the 8th largest majority-Latino country
in the nation by population.
He said growing up in Chihuahua, Mexico, made him feel at home at Tamale Fest in the city of Somerton.
"I
think we're here now [for the] fourth time in less than two months,"
Gallego told local news station KYMA then. "The kind of culture you see
here is the culture I grew up in, so it feels very familiar to me."
Keeping
the food theme going, Gallego will soon be taken on a culinary tour by
Bryan Soto, known as Señor Foodie, who has nearly 150,000 followers
across Instagram and TikTok, of his favorite local Latino-owned
restaurants in South Phoenix.
To reach
these lofty goals, Robles said Gallego's campaign along with his
supporters will need to have more understanding in their conversations
with Latinos, especially those who don't follow politics closely, to
explain the differences between his campaign and Lake's.
He
pinpointed housing, water issues, lack of funding for education, and
the effects of former governor Doug Ducey's tax cuts reflected in this
year's budget deficit and cuts to social services as areas where Gallego
can target the most urgent needs in the state from an immediate action
perspective.
Gallego hosted a roundtable
discussion with local Phoenix leaders like Eva Olivas last week, who
said her group often fields calls on the lack of housing affordability,
to share his plans to help first-time home buyers, seniors, and veterans
with things like reallocating housing vouchers other states don't use
when more are needed in Arizona.
"Until
we address unifying issues, it's hard to get people excited," Robles
added. "Making those conversations accessible to Latinos will help
create the kind of outreach strategy to put Ruben on top."
Sinema
— the incumbent — hasn't said whether she plans to run for reelection.
Meanwhile, Gallego has consolidated Democratic support while Lake is the
clear frontrunner in the GOP primary. The looming question is whether
or not the Sinema will seek reelection. She has not made that decision
yet.
However, Lake keeps cropping up
on vice presidential shortlists for former President Donald Trump's
third GOP ticket, and she has campaigned for her political idol in both
Iowa and New Hampshire. A devoted Trump acolyte, Lake has said she is not focused on VP speculation and wants to help Trump in the Senate if they are both elected.
Mike
Noble, the founder of polling firm Noble Predictive Insights, said
Lake's performance with Hispanics is "very reminiscent" of how Trump did
with Latino voters, doing better than an average Republican based on
how Hispanics usually vote.
But polling
data and her reception at the recent Arizona State Republican
convention, where she was booed days after DeWit's forced resignation,
has caught notice and underscored the challenge of being too closely
associated with Trump.
The Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee blasted the video of Lake attempting to
speak over the boos. "We don't agree on everything. But what we do agree
on is that the elections in Arizona are a corrupt mess," she said as
the boos continued.
Noble said that a
significant 25% to 30% of the Republican electorate is not a fan of
Lake, which means a chunk of the moderate base may not turnout. He said
his data shows 76% of independent voters also don't agree that Trump won
the 2020 election, which he said is 50% of voters who truly don't lean
to either party, along with less than 25% who lean-Democrat and more
than 25% who lean-GOP.
"The 'stolen
election' is not a good issue for the general," he said. "Jobs and the
economy is a killer issue, the border is a massive issue, but then you
go 'Hey, the earth is flat,' and it's like 'Whoa!' So that's a choice."
On September 22, federal prosecutors filed an indictment against New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and his wife, Nadine, that read like a caricature of graft. The two were accused of accepting bribes
from a stupefying cast of characters, including a halal-meat exporter
and a Bergen County condo magnate, in exchange for political favors.
According to the government, the scheme involved envelopes stuffed with
cash, a no-show job for Nadine, and a sitting U.S. senator Googling “How
much is one kilo of gold worth.”
The
day after the indictment, Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman from the
state, announced he was running for Menendez’s seat. Aaron Sorkin and
the writers of The West Wing could not have crafted a character
as menschy and public-service oriented. Kim is a Rhodes scholar who ran
point on ISIS counterterrorism in the Obama White House and flipped a
pro-Trump congressional district in 2018. After the January 6 riots, he
literally cleaned up the Capitol Rotunda, garbage bag in hand. And yet
in the weeks following his announcement, Kim wasn’t endorsed by a single
major Democrat in New Jersey. This wasn’t out of loyalty to Menendez,
who has pleaded not guilty and is refusing to step down. Rather,
everyone was waiting for a different candidate to declare, someone whose
interest in the seat was an open secret: the First Lady of New Jersey.
Tammy
Murphy has never held elected office. Until 2015, she was a registered
Republican. She lacks populist bona fides: Like her husband, Governor Phil Murphy,
she began her career at Goldman Sachs, and the two are said to have a
net worth in the nine figures, with a mansion in beachy Middletown and a
23.5-room villa in Umbria. Yet immediately after she announced her
candidacy on November 15, New Jersey’s entire Democratic Establishment —
mayors, legislators, party chairs — coalesced behind her. Of the
state’s nine Democratic representatives in Washington, six endorsed her.
Among the remaining three, one is staying neutral, one is Menendez’s
son, and one is Andy Kim.
A
Murphy win would create a virtually unprecedented scenario: a spouse of
a sitting governor elected to the U.S. Senate. Yet it would be reckless
for anyone in New Jersey politics to antagonize the Murphys. They’re
excellent fundraisers, and it is hard to find a local Democrat who
couldn’t use the help of Governor Murphy and a future Senator Murphy —
and maybe down the line a Murphy in the Cabinet or even the White House.
Tammy Murphy should have a monstrous advantage in the June primary
thanks to money and name recognition — the kind of edge last glimpsed in
2000, when Hillary Clinton
ran for Senate in New York in the waning months of her husband’s
presidency. She stands to get an even greater boost from New Jersey’s
powerful county bosses, who design ballots and therefore can sway
elections and who in turn profit from the goodwill of the governor.
Local
press coverage of Tammy Murphy’s candidacy has been jaundiced, and
Democrats across the state have been moaning about her undeserved
advantages. But only anonymously. One elected official tells me, “Do I
think she’s the best candidate? No. Do I think it’s a good look for New
Jersey? No. If you’re asking me am I going to vote for her? The answer
is no.” This is a person who has publicly endorsed her.
For
someone who has never run for office, Murphy gives a perfectly
competent diner interview. It’s late December and she’s sitting in a
booth at Tops, a once-blue-collar eatery in East Newark that was
recently gussied up in Art Deco style. She orders a salad and an iced
tea and studiously avoids reacting to the prominent tattoo of an AR-15
on the arm of our waitress, who seems to have recognized the First Lady
and starts to check in so often the ink has become impossible to ignore.
“Welcome to New Jersey,” Murphy says, shrugging.
Murphy,
58, is easy to talk to, businesslike but engaging. Where Phil is a
lanky backslapper prone to corny sports metaphors, she is a more
controlled presence and droll in a practiced, country-club kind of way.
She jokes, deadpan, that her purple Theory suit is a gift from her
“first husband.” (Phil is her only husband.) The Murphys and their four
adult children will soon travel to Costa Rica for Christmas. Tammy says
she bought Phil, once the president of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theater
society, My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand’s 992-page autobiography. (Phil would give her Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America, by Ohio senator Sherrod Brown.)
Given
her lack of a political record, Murphy’s beliefs on many issues are
unknown. I ask her to name some ideological disagreements she has with
Phil, who ran for office in 2017 as an arch-liberal, while she once gave
$50,000 to the Republican National Committee. “It’s a lot easier to
tell you what we agree on,” she says. “He was raised as a Catholic; I
was not. He would call his family working poor, and mine was not. But we
both really feel strongly about the promise of the American Dream and
how that’s really been lost. And that, I think, is probably the reason
why I’m sitting across the table from you: because I fear for the next
generation and all those who come after.” Essentially in the middle of a
stump speech now, she continues, “Most people in the next generation
worry about where they can go to college, worry about if they can get
health care, worry about if they can find housing.”
The
further Murphy gets from domestic topics, the more specific and
sometimes surprising her answers become. What’s her position on the
Ukraine-border deal that’s lurching through Congress? She advocates for
dollars to flow to Kiev immediately and then something middle of the
road on immigration, perhaps involving the toughening of asylum laws but
citizenship for Dreamers. Would she opine on the war in Gaza? Here too
she follows the main Democratic line, expressing staunch support for
Israel and a two-state solution with reservations about extreme elements
of the Israeli right. (Murphy, whose late father was Jewish, says she
has visited the country nine times.) She also floats a theory about the
war, drawing on the years she lived abroad when Phil served as President
Obama’s ambassador to Germany: “In my opinion, there’s about four
really bad actors in the world” — Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea —
“and this whole thing was instigated as a proxy war in order to
distract the West, in order to make sure we weren’t able to focus on
Ukraine.”
Murphy
is a vocal environmentalist, but she parries a question about whether
she supports her husband’s lawsuit against New York City’s
congestion-pricing scheme, saying the plan will just move existing
traffic around. Would she abolish the Senate filibuster? “I don’t know,”
she says. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought other than I hate it
when I watch it.” Should Democratic voters be concerned about her GOP
past? She says she inherited the moderate Republicanism of her parents
and has long been passionate about liberal priorities such as
reproductive freedom, gun safety, and education. “I have given more
money to Democrats than I ever have to Republicans,” she says, “and I
have not voted for a Republican in a general election in two decades.”
Bad
answer, good answer — it probably doesn’t matter. Murphy’s most telling
response isn’t about the issues at all. As we wrap up lunch, I ask what
the rest of her day looks like. “Bunch of Zooms, fundraising,” she
says. Because she delayed her entry into the race until after New
Jersey’s off-year elections in November, she says, she had less time to
rack up big fundraising numbers before a December 31 deadline. “Once I
figured out I was going to be a declared candidate, I had to have a
perfect launch. Perfect rolling endorsements. I had to have great
fundraising. And all that had to happen after the last election,” she
says. “Which gave me less than six weeks to raise for an entire quarter —
including Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve.”
There,
laid out with admirable frankness, is what this race is about: cash,
optics, the unusually exposed guts of one state’s party machinery. If
Tammy Murphy faces trouble with voters, it will not be over policy —
there’s not much daylight between her and Kim — but over the specter of
nepotism, especially in a battle to replace a man widely viewed as
corrupt. In a hypernationalized and, lately, internationalized political
environment (see your local council’s cease-fire resolution), there is
something perversely refreshing about a high-stakes election defined
instead by family ambition and parochial power plays. This is insider
politics at its most brazen. Murphy will probably be New Jersey’s next
senator because she is married to its current governor.
Tammy
and Phil Murphy have long billed themselves as a tandem. She was raised
in Virginia Beach, where her father and mother (a British expat and
former model) ran a car-dealership empire. She graduated from the
University of Virginia in 1987, spent a few years at Goldman Sachs in
New York, then moved to London to work at Smith Barney and Investcorp.
Murphy was at that last firm, a Bahraini leveraged-buyout specialist,
when it acquired Gucci. Murphy says she became friendly with chairman
Maurizio Gucci — “Which leathers do you like best?” he would ask her —
before his ex-wife had him killed in a murder-for-hire plot. Murphy also
got to know Tom Ford, then the creative director of Gucci, who she says
confided in her about almost leaving the fashion house before what
would be a legendary runway show in Milan. “I woke up in December to a
fax from Tom, who said he’d just seen his astrologer the night before,”
Murphy recalls. “And the astrologer told him he couldn’t leave Gucci —
that something big was going to happen if he stayed.”
In
1994, she began dating Phil, a loose acquaintance who was running
Goldman’s Frankfurt office and would next lead its Asia operations out
of Hong Kong. They got engaged after just 18 days and were married
within six months. Eventually, they moved to New Jersey, settling down
in a riverside estate not far from Jon Bon Jovi’s, where Tammy raised
the children and embarked on a second career as a prolific supporter of
political and philanthropic causes. She sat on the boards of Rumson
Country Day School, which her children attended; Phillips Academy, which
they also attended; UVA; and an Al Gore nonprofit called the Climate
Reality Project, all of which the Murphys furnished with six-figure
donations. She also began cutting checks to politicians in and outside
New Jersey: Republicans at first, then mostly Democrats — including Andy
Kim, twice. Since 2000, she has contributed to some 300 candidates and
committees, according to state and federal records.
In
2006, Phil retired from Goldman and became the finance chair of the
Democratic National Committee. The gobs of money he raised paved the way
for his ambassadorship to Germany in 2009. The Murphys returned from
Berlin in 2013, not intending to stay idle. “They had a company even
before they got back from Germany called Murphy Endeavors,” says an
early ally, describing an LLC the couple sometimes listed when making
donations. “Nobody really understood what Murphy Endeavors was, except
the endeavor of the Murphys.”
That
fall, they scheduled a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in lower Manhattan
with a veteran New Jersey political operative named Julie Roginsky to
lay the groundwork for a gubernatorial run. Roginsky had worked for Jon
Corzine in the Senate and was wary of taking on another politically
inexperienced Goldmanite. But Phil — a deal guy, not a trader — blew her
away with his pitch. Phil said that he and Tammy would do everything
together, running their campaign as an extension of their tight-knit
family unit. “He always referred to himself as ‘we,’” Roginsky recalls.
(She would later break from the Murphys in bitter fashion.)
The
next election wasn’t for another four years, but the Murphys thought
Chris Christie might leave office early to run for president and didn’t
want to be caught unprepared. In the spring of 2014, Phil sent an email
to White House counselor John Podesta. “We are likely to establish a
policy-oriented c4 aimed at growing the NJ economy from $500 to $600
billion in 5 years,” he wrote. “We are hoping that a platform like this
will give us visibility, credentials, etc.” This would become a
tax-exempt dark-money “issue advocacy” group called New Start New
Jersey, chaired by Tammy, whom Phil would call his “de facto finance
chair.”
At
the end of 2014, the Murphys mass-mailed a family Christmas card
announcing their keen interest in the governorship. “We say ‘we’ because
for us, leadership and public service are team sports,” they wrote.
“When we are in, we are all in.” The card disclosed a staggering range
of plutocratic exploits, such as traveling to “Berlin, Italy, England,
Lisbon, the Caribbean, Utah, Florida, and to Virginia and Massachusetts”
as well as watching the World Cup “from New Jersey and Europe” — a
level of jet-setting that offended a number of minivan-driving New
Jersey commentators.
Phil
spent more than $20 million of the family’s money in the course of
winning the 2017 governor’s race. After the election, for a function at
their home, the Murphys sent legislators invitations that mislabeled
Tammy as “the First Lady–elect,” even though she had not been on the
ballot. That set the tone for the years to follow, in which Tammy made
good on the Murphy Christmas card’s promise of an administration in the
first-person plural.
There’s
nothing prohibiting the First Lady, who doesn’t take a salary, from
getting neck deep in state politics. It just hadn’t really been done
before. Tammy secured an office next to Phil’s and, in the
administration’s first pseudo-scandal, incurred a $13,000 bill by
installing a door for it. At least among their nemeses, the impression
stuck that the Murphys operated via aristocratic fiat. “He thinks he’s
the king of England, and Mrs. thinks she’s the queen of England,” South
Jersey political boss George Norcross complained in 2019 after the
Murphy administration began investigating lucrative tax breaks flowing
his way.
A
political adviser in Trenton tells me that early on, during a
negotiation on an energy bill that would subsidize a nuclear plant, he
was told that one of the Murphys wanted to tack on provisions for solar
energy, while the other was pushing for wind. “Like, What?” the
adviser says. “You didn’t hear shit like that. The House, the Senate,
the governor, and the First Lady are independent bargaining entities on a
piece of legislation?”
Still,
this was New Jersey, which from Abscam to Bridgegate has hardly been
the land of good government, and Tammy’s extraconstitutional activities
didn’t qualify as particularly outrageous. If anything, given that she
was pushing for liberal priorities, they earned her some respect. And if
a cursory impression of Murphy’s Senate race suggests she’s a
lightweight riding her husband’s coattails, many in Trenton would flip
the image, portraying Phil as the happy-go-lucky charmer and Murphy as
the disciplined grinder. “He’s feckless but a glad-hander,” says one
veteran Democratic political operative. “She’s the opposite of a
glad-hander but not feckless.”
Tammy
has carved out legislative priorities, largely around improving the
state’s abysmal record on infant and maternal health and implementing
climate-change curricula in public schools — something New Jersey has
become the first state to mandate. But her centrality to the Murphy
political apparatus has also made her a useful asset for those who need
something from the governor. State Senator Raj Mukherji, who represents
Hudson County, says Tammy was crucial in pressing the administration to
appropriate a $10 million lifeline last summer for New Jersey City
University, a public institution in fiscal crisis. “She gets involved in
brokering better language than perhaps agencies in the executive branch
are willing to agree with,” Mukherji says. “I deal with staff, I deal
with Cabinet members, but when I don’t want to risk it falling through
the cracks, when I don’t have time to explain it to seven different
people, I go to Tammy.”
Two
years ago, as rumors floated that Phil Murphy might run for president
if Joe Biden passed on a second term, Tammy became chair of a new
dark-money group called Stronger Fairer Forward, created to tout aspects
of Phil’s record, such as his millionaire surtax and his increase of
school funding. The Murphys have refused to release the names of its
benefactors, but last year the Bergen Record figured out via
IRS filings that large donors to the group included the International
Longshoremen’s Association and the New Jersey Education Association, the
latter of which had already given millions to Phil Murphy through other
channels. Both unions have benefited under the Murphy administration.
The state, for instance, recently pulled out of a 70-year watchdog
entity called the Waterfront Commission, originally designed to root out
Mafia influence at the ports, calling its oversight burdensome to
dockworkers.
After
Stronger Fairer Forward’s formation, Politico created a tracker
counting the days since the Murphys refused to reveal its donors, while
New Jersey’s Star-Ledger speculated about the potential it
created for influence peddling. “If they’re going to hide these
secrets,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote, “then it’s fair to ask:
Does money from the state’s powerful teachers union, the NJEA, explain
the Murphy administration blocking the expansion of popular charter
schools that were rated as top performers by his own Department of
Education?” When I ask Tammy if the group will reconsider making its
contributors public, she says, “We said to the donors that we were not
going to release their names,” adding, “We agreed up front how we were
going to operate. It was within the law. And if the law was different,
we would operate differently.”
Tammy
stepped down from Stronger Fairer Forward before running for Senate,
but Murphy, Inc., remains a joint enterprise. Tammy’s communications
director, Alexandra Altman, moved over from the statehouse, where she
worked as the governor’s deputy communications director. Tammy’s
campaign manager, Max Glass, is the husband of Phil’s 2021 campaign
manager, Mollie Binotto. The super-PAC supporting Tammy’s campaign,
Garden State Integrity, is run by Phil’s former deputy chief of staff
Joe Kelley, a Murphy-appointed Port Authority commissioner who recently
ran a consulting shop with Phil’s former press secretary Dan Bryan, who
is now Tammy’s lead campaign strategist and the executive director of
Stronger Fairer Forward, which remains active.
One
Friday in January, I join Murphy in the back seat of a government Chevy
Suburban. Her laptop is propped up on a portable desk, and she is
mid-Zoom with her chief of staff and two lawyers, one of whom represents
an A-list, Jersey-born star. Murphy wants to rename a rest stop on the
Garden State Parkway in the star’s honor, part of a celebrity-tourism
initiative, but the lawyer is inexplicably resistant. Murphy speaks
calmly but impatiently: “Phil and I, I can tell you, are huge fans, as
is our entire family, and we would wear it as a badge of honor if this
did happen. Saying that — we are at the bottom of the ninth.”
She
briefly pauses to take a call from one of her sons, then resumes. “Jon
Bon Jovi, you know, Judy Blume — all of these celebrities have agreed to
the terms that the state has put forward,” she says before delivering
an ultimatum. “This is the last chance. If we get off this phone call
and we do not have a deal, then, heartbreakingly, we’re going to have to
move on.” Murphy closes her computer, and the Zoom continues without
her. “I’ve been going back and forth with this lawyer for six months
now,” she says. “Not happy with him.”
Murphy
had invited me to observe her for a day of various appointments
involving her core initiatives as First Lady, including a visit to a
high-school art class incorporating climate change and a briefing on a
program guaranteeing new mothers free home-nurse visitation that she
shepherded into law. She also makes a campaign stop at a diner in
Bordentown to meet with a pastor named Keith Davis and his
brother-in-law, Amir Khan, an activist and political gadfly. Both work
in Camden, the impoverished South Jersey city, and Murphy wants their
help meeting voters.
Murphy
makes her pitch, discussing the racial prejudices that underscore New
Jersey’s elevated maternal-mortality rates and her efforts to reverse
the trend. Khan says he’s with her “1,000 percent.” Why wouldn’t he be?
There is only upside in helping the campaign of the wife of the
governor. Khan notes that Davis runs a nonprofit providing incarcerated
people with technology training. “Keith is able to do all this
grassroots, bare budget,” Khan says. “Imagine if we had somebody
representing us down in Washington, bringing true dollars in.” Murphy
says she’d like to connect Davis with the head of the state’s Economic
Development Authority. Davis says he’d love to have a relationship with
the AI hub the state is building with Princeton University, which Phil
announced two weeks earlier.
“If you know anyone on that, that would be fantastic,” he says.
“I do,” she replies. He concludes the meeting with a prayer for Murphy.
None
of this is scandalous; the bar for rank transactionalism in New Jersey
has been set much higher by Menendez, whom the government has accused of
acting for the benefit of Egypt and Qatar. But the exchange captures a
crucial dynamic in the race to replace him: Despite the fact that no New
Jerseyan has ever cast a vote for her, Murphy can win by behaving like
an incumbent, leveraging the possibility of access to officials,
programs, and funds.
Consider
the support she has drawn from the state’s county-party chairs. They
are unusually important because they control where candidates show up on
the ballot. This year, for example, whichever candidate gets the
so-called line in a given county will appear in a row or column next to
President Biden, while the candidates who don’t will appear off in
ballot Siberia, perhaps out of view of the average low-information
voter. A study published last year in a Seton Hall University journal
found that the line alone confers a 38-point advantage among candidates
for the U.S. Congress.
It
is hard to disentangle the chairs’ endorsements of Murphy from the
business they conduct before her husband, who will preside over two more
state budgets. LeRoy J. Jones, the chair of the state Democratic Party,
as well as Essex County’s party chair, is a lobbyist. Paul Juliano,
Democratic chair of Bergen County, has a six-figure state job with the
New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, the entity that runs the
Meadowlands. Tammy is all but certain to have the line in those counties
and more, including Camden, despite the administration’s old feud with
Norcross, who chairs a hospital that receives tens of millions a year in
state funds. The line is so powerful it can subvert ordinary political
hierarchies, such that veteran lawmakers become slavishly indebted to
little-known county hacks. When the Daily Beast asked Bill Pascrell why
he endorsed Murphy, the 87-year-old U.S. congressman replied, “Do I
fight my county chairman?”
The
mood in Trenton is largely one of resignation. “I’m not pretending to
be in touch with real-life people, but in terms of political people,
there is no enthusiasm for her,” says a Democratic consultant not
working for Murphy or Kim. And yet political cynicism is so entrenched
in New Jersey that one of the Murphy side’s main knocks against Kim is
that he hasn’t mastered the game, that he isn’t a committed
schmoozer. Her backers portray him as preferring to remain in Washington
or cloistered in his district, while Murphy traverses the Turnpike.
“She’s hauled up and down the state,” says Congressman Josh Gottheimer.
“Last year, we were in Englewood, packing food for those in need in the
community at a Baptist church. I saw her last week — she was in Glen
Rock helping swear in an all-female mayor and council.” (Many assume
Gottheimer will run for governor next year, along with fellow U.S.
representative Mikie Sherrill, who has also endorsed Murphy.)
It’s
an assessment I heard across the state, including from critics of the
First Lady. “To her credit, she has actually built some relationships.
Andy Kim has not at all,” says one Murphy-skeptical Democratic insider.
Another Democratic campaign operative says, “Andy plays at 35,000 feet.
Tammy hustles. She gets out there. She goes out to local
beef-and-beers.” Richard J. Codey, the former governor and an outgoing
state senator, says of Kim, “I can’t say one word negative against him. I
just don’t know the gentleman.”
Murphy
may even benefit from portrayals of her as a member of the Democratic
machine because they rebut the idea that she is a crypto-Republican.
Phil has twice chaired the Democratic Governors Association, whose
executive director, Meghan Meehan-Draper, gushes about Tammy’s
fundraising prowess and love for the party. When Phil took office, one
of Tammy’s aides points out, the state party was fractured and
considered weak, symbolized by a crumbling headquarters. Tammy helped
shore the organization up. “I’m honored by the fact that people who’ve
spent decades building up the Democratic Party in New Jersey are leaning
in to help me and support me,” she says. “But it didn’t happen by
coincidence. I had been working with the state party for years.” She
adds, “This is my third statewide campaign. It’s Andy’s first. I would
say he’s been very focused on a small sliver and he doesn’t know the
state like I do.” To be clear, it’s the first statewide campaign for
each.
In
any case, New Jersey voters may have simply become inured to the
concept of nepotism. The state’s congressional delegation already
features four such cases, including Menendez fils; Donald Payne Jr.,
whose father served 12 terms in the House; Tom Kean Jr., whose father
was governor; and Donald Norcross, George’s brother. Still, given the
gold-ingot tier of alleged corruption that enabled her run, I ask Murphy
if she is really the right candidate for the moment.
“Yes,
I am, on so many levels,” she says. “I would also say to you that Rob
Menendez, his son, is somebody I like. I went out and supported him when
he was running. He’s a really earnest, hardworking, smart person.” She
continues, “Dynasties, whatever you want to call them — I don’t view us
as a dynasty. I view us as people who really, genuinely want to help.”
The
general election in November is expected to be a cakewalk for
Democrats. New Jersey hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate since 1972,
and Menendez won his last election by 11 points — after getting
indicted for the first time (there was a mistrial) and formally
reprimanded by an ethics committee. A high-profile conservative could
always enter the race, but for now, the presumed Republican front-runner
is Mendham Township mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, who calls Murphy
“Bougie Tammy.” U.S. representative Jeff Van Drew is also said to be
considering a bid.
The
line notwithstanding, it’s possible that Murphy could lose the primary.
On January 18, Kim scored a major coup when Senator John Fetterman of
Pennsylvania endorsed him. Fetterman has been Menendez’s harshest critic
in Washington, and he isn’t much gentler on Murphy. “New Jersey has the
luxury of a choice between what kind of Democratic senator we want,” he
tells me. “You have someone like Representative Kim, or you have the
nepo candidate with a history of being a registered Republican.” Murphy,
he adds, is running because of “who she happens to be married to and
is hoping that she will leverage those connections to achieve a special
position on the ballot. I still can’t believe how that even exists.”
When
I meet with Kim — first at a fundraiser at a supporter’s home, then at a
greasy spoon — he’s more understated than Fetterman in his critique,
his tone closer to mild incredulity. “The idea that two of New Jersey’s
three statewide positions would be husband and wife — that’s something
never before seen in American politics,” he says. “I think it makes a
lot of people in the state uncomfortable. Especially in the aftermath of
Menendez. There’s this question of ‘What lesson is New Jersey going to
learn from this?’” Kim also presses the contrast between his years of
Democratic service and Murphy’s past support for the GOP. “As someone
who worked in the Obama White House in 2013 and 2014, around the time
that she was still a Republican, it’s a concern to me,” he says. “I
don’t actually know what her positions are.” Before running Iraq policy
at the National Security Council, Kim worked as a civilian military
adviser in Afghanistan. “With all the craziness happening in the world
right now — the war in Europe, the war in the Middle East — I think
people recognize it’s important to have some experience.”
There
is no independent polling of the contest so far, only internal surveys
from Kim’s campaign. They were conducted last year and have him in
front, 45 to 22, with about half of respondents saying they didn’t have
an opinion on either candidate. (Bob Menendez clocked in at 4 percent.)
Still, few are predicting a Kim victory, and Murphy’s inner circle is
projecting confidence. “The campaign’s paid-communications effort will
be far more focused on a proactive, positive message” than on Kim, says
one of her advisers. Murphy’s first campaign video highlights her role
as a woman on Wall Street in a male-dominated era; she frequently cites
her work on maternal health and points out she would become the state’s
first female senator.
Her
campaign may also be vulnerable on women’s issues. Last January, a
state trooper named Claire Krauchuk was assigned to the governor’s
detail, monitoring security footage from a trailer on the Murphys’
property. Krauchuk had recently given birth and was pumping breast milk
in the trailer, whose bathroom she called fetid. Krauchuk says she asked
her superior to ask Tammy Murphy if she could pump in the property’s
carriage house. According to a lawsuit she and three other female
troopers filed against the state police, Krauchuk’s supervisor reported
back that Murphy denied the request “because of optics” involving
“guests who may be on the premises.”
When
I ask Murphy about the suit, she says she can’t comment fully on the
litigation, even though it was not filed against her or her husband. But
she does say, “Anybody who should imply that I would be in any way,
shape, or form discriminatory or not allow a woman to have all the
benefits she needs after having delivered a baby or during pregnancy —
it’s flat-out wrong.”
A number of other local controversies have dogged the Murphys. In 2018, the soccer website the Equalizerreported
that a professional women’s team the couple co-owned with the former
CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond lived and trained in squalor. The practice
facility had no locker room or running water, and players were put up in
horrific rental apartments, some of which had plastic sheets in lieu of
windows. A subsequent report found that the team had once fired its
coach for infractions including “verbal and emotional abuse” and kept it
quiet, writing instead in a press release that the reasons for the
departure were “mutual.”
Phil
has told reporters Tammy is a “big passionate soccer fan” and that “we
poured our hearts and resources into this.” Tammy tells me, “I was never
involved in the team.” She says she was unaware of the players’
conditions and the allegations of abuse, framing her and her husband’s
ownership as a kind of passive investment. After the Equalizer’s report,
Tammy took a more active role in the team, renaming it Gotham FC and
moving the players to Red Bull Arena in Harrison, commencing a
turnaround that culminated in last season’s National Women’s Soccer
League championship.
Arguably
the biggest scandal of the Murphy era dates to the 2017 campaign, which
faced allegations of sexist behavior and abuse. Roginsky, Murphy’s
early campaign consultant, says she was fired after complaining about a
colleague who referred to her by a sexual epithet, among other
allegations of fratty inappropriateness. (Other Murphy staffers say she
left because she lost an internal power struggle.) At the same time, a
Murphy campaign volunteer named Katie Brennan alleged that a campaign
staffer had sexually assaulted her in her Jersey City apartment.
Prosecutors declined to press charges. Brennan raised the matter with
members of the Murphy administration and emailed Phil and Tammy, asking
to meet about a “sensitive matter.” She didn’t get into specifics, and
the meeting took place with a lawyer, not the Murphys.
Eventually, after Brennan took her story to TheWall Street Journal,
the man was fired and the legislature conducted hearings. Brennan, who
would later work in New York governor Kathy Hochul’s administration,
settled out of court with the State of New Jersey and the Murphy
campaign for $1 million, which she donated. The Murphys have said they
did not know of Brennan’s allegations until they were contacted by the Journal.
“I apologize to her,” Tammy says. “I feel badly for her because yours
truly was sexually assaulted. I had to go to court, and I know exactly
how that feels. I get it. Again, though, we are forward-looking, and we
pick up the pieces and figure out how to make 1,000 percent certain that
we never are replicating something that’s hurtful or in any way
disrespectful. And it’s one of the many reasons why our campaigns are
best in class.”
Whatever
Murphy’s vulnerabilities on women’s issues, she says her own gender has
colored the criticism of her candidacy. At a recent event, Murphy
argued that if her name were “Tommy” Murphy, people wouldn’t be
questioning her credentials. It’s a tough hypothetical to test since New
Jersey has only ever had one First Gentleman and he didn’t run for
Senate while his spouse was governor. But there’s something to the Tommy
argument. New Jersey has a rich history of male nepotism cases and
underqualified men in office in general. Bill Bradley won his Senate
seat at the age of 35, having not held a job besides basketball player.
Frank Lautenberg was the CEO of a data-processing company and an
appointed Port Authority commissioner. Corzine and Phil Murphy
effectively bought their seats with Goldman money. Tammy Murphy is
arguably more qualified than Phil was when he ran for governor, given
her six years as a shadow macher to his zero.
“She
wasn’t just this woman elevated by her husband,” says a prominent
consultant. “She put herself in that position.” As a matter of
Realpolitik, there is an argument that if Tammy shrewdly grabbed the
inside track, the fault wasn’t hers but that of the system she was
working within. In any event, she is nothing like a Lurleen Wallace, the
apolitical homemaker whom George Wallace, the term-limited governor of
Alabama, famously propped up to run as his surrogate in 1966; or Elaine
Edwards, briefly appointed to the Senate by her husband, Edwin, the
governor of Louisiana, in 1972; or the eight widows who have been
appointed to or otherwise filled their dead husbands’ Senate seats over
the years. The possibility of a governor-senator power couple on the
Acela corridor has come up so suddenly, and so unprecedentedly, that
national Democrats are still searching for ways to put it in context —
or to predict what the Murphys might do with their combined heft.
The
high-dollar consultant set is not troubled by the prospect. “So what?”
is the assessment of Joel Benenson, who worked as a strategist for
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Precedents are meant to be broken.
Before Barack Obama, no Black person had ever been elected president
before. Don’t get locked into the past.” Veteran Democratic hand Bob
Shrum thinks back to his time working for Edward Kennedy. “In some ways,
the most obvious comparison would be JFK as president with Teddy
getting elected to the Senate in 1962,” he says. Robert Kennedy was also
serving as attorney general. “You know, for Massachusetts and the
country, I would argue, that worked out rather well,” he adds.
With
respect to previous husband-and-wife tandems, the Clintons make an
inexact comparison: Hillary moved to a new state to run for Senate and
was sworn in just a short time before Bill left the White House. (In
that 2000 race, Murphy contributed to Hillary’s GOP opponent, Rick
Lazio.) Olympia Snowe’s situation is closer to the mark. She ran for
Senate in Maine during the last year of her husband’s governorship, but
they overlapped for only two days in 1995, and she had been a U.S.
congresswoman since before they married.
The
dynamic of a possible Murphy mini-dynasty may also shift based on the
outcome of the presidential election. In a second Biden term, Phil would
make a natural pick for Cabinet secretary. There is some precedent
there: Elizabeth Dole served as secretary of Transportation and
secretary of Labor while her husband, Bob, was a senator. Donald Trump’s
secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, was confirmed by a Senate led
by her husband, Mitch McConnell. “I feel a little bit like Nathan
Hale,” McConnell said during her hearing, repeating a Dole joke. “‘I
regret that I have but one wife to give for my country.’”
Phil’s
national aspirations have been well publicized, but Tammy demurs when I
ask how her potential senatorship might play in a 2028 Phil Murphy
presidential run. She prefers to focus on her own priorities for the
Senate. “I’m going to stand up for what’s right. I’m going to take on
the extremists who are trying to deny abortion rights and voting rights,
but abortion rights specifically. It’s appalling to me that my
daughter, your daughter, should have fewer rights than I had,” she says.
“I really would like the chance to continue to work on the environment.
I want to work on gun safety. I just don’t think we’re attacking in the
right way. I think we need to shift the conversation. It’s a health
epidemic.”
In
New Jersey, Democrats have controlled all branches of government since
the conclusion of the Christie administration. I ask how she would
tackle gridlock in Washington. “I’m pretty tenacious,” she says. “At the
end of the day, I will figure out a way to win that person over.” She
adds, “I get shit done. I go into the houses that are on fire. Gotham FC
was on fire, if you want to put it that way.”
Still,
she says, there are some lines she’s not willing to cross in order to
get results. At one point, I ask if she would consider self-funding her
candidacy, as her husband did in 2017. “That is absolutely not my
intention, and I intend to get every single vote that I win by bringing
people together and by showing leadership,” she says. “Given what
happened with Senator Menendez, I think we really need a democratic
election.”
IMO Israel has implemented more measure to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare than any other military in the history of war. This includes many measure the U.S. has (or has not) taken in wars & battles but also many measures no military in the world has ever taken.
Precautions during the initial air campaign to target enemy military capabilities to include using precision guided munitions and strict targeting protocols in both pre-planned and dynamic strikes against only military targets.
Use of precision guided munitions (PCMs). Despite the ignorance of reporting on ratios of PCMs to non-PCMs, Israel has used many types of PCMs to include lower collateral damage munitions/small diameter bombs & technologies & tactics that increase the accuracy of non-PCMs (dive bombing) limit civilian causalities (sat imagery, AI, cell phone presence)
The idea that a military must use more PCMs vs non-PCMs in a war is a myth. In the Frist Gulf War the U.S. fired 250,000 individual bombs and missiles in just 43 days. A small fraction of those would fit the definition of PCMs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/fogofwar/analysis.htm
Also myths about choose of munitions & proportionality assessment/value of target/collateral damage estimate such as saying a 500 lbs bomb would achieve the same military task of a 2,000 lbs bomb with no mention of tunnels that would require greater penetration or availability of types/quantity of munitions.
Call/Text ahead of a strike with (at times) roof-knocking (no military has every implemented in war). In some cases, IDF will call, text, drop small munitions on the roof of a building. While limited in the context of the strike it has been used in this war.
Provide warning and evacuate urban areas/cities before the full combined air and ground attack begins. While the tactic does alert the enemy defender and provide them the military advantage to prepare further, it is one of the best ways to prevent civilian casualties.
The U.S. did not do this in the invasion of Iraq or attack of Baghdad in 2003. Did not do this in the 2004 1st Battle of Fallujah but did do this in the Second Battle of Fallujah 6 months later because of the different context.
In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, the Iraq government told the civilian to not evacuate and shelter in place during the battle for both Eastern and Western Mosul, but later changed instructions further into the battle.
Israel provided days and then weeks of warnings and time for civilians to evacuate multiple cities in Northern Gaza before starting the main air-ground attack of urban areas.
Use of air dropped flyers to give instruction on evacuations and establishing evacuation corridors (U.S. implemented in 2nd Fallujah & assisted 2016-2017 Mosul). Israel dropped over 520,000 pamphlets, broadcasted over radio and through social media messages to provide instruction for civilians to leave combat areas using corridors.
Use of real phone calls (19,734) to civilians in the combat areas, SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to civilians to provide instructions on evacuations. No military has never done this in urban warfare history.
Daily pauses for civilian evacuations. Israel conducted daily 4-hour pauses over multiple consecutive days. While pauses for civilian evacuations after a war or battle have started is not completely new but the frequency and predictability used in Gaza may have been historic.
There is no modern comparison to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel is not fighting a battle it is fighting a war.
No military in modern history has faced 30k defenders embedded in more than more than 7 cities, using human shields and hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites while holding hundreds of hostages and launching over +12k rockets at the attacking military's civilians areas.
Again, Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in the history of war. While some have argued Israel could have waited longer, used different munitions, or not conducted the war at all - but these all fail to acknowledge the context of Israel’s war from the hostages, rockets, tunnels, existential threat of Hamas, and more but also fail to recognize what Israel has done to prevent civilians casualties.
Today
she’s typically described as a former advice columnist, but that term
doesn’t really do justice to E. Jean Carroll’s career pre-Donald Trump.
Long
before she was one of the longest-serving advice columnists in America,
Ms. Carroll blazed trails as a gonzo-style journalist The Times once called “feminism’s answer to Hunter Thompson.”
She profiled Lyle Lovett and went camping with the notorious New York curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz for a cover story in Outside. She wrote a famous piece on Dan Rather for Esquire, appeared in the “Best American Crime Writing” and was the first female contributing editor at Playboy — back when people really did read it for the articles.
Today, at best, she’s the former Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
At worst, she’s the crazy Trump rape lawsuit lady. Or, as she put it in
court recently: “Previously, I was known simply as a journalist, and
now I’m known as the liar, the fraud and the wack job.”
For
weeks now, there have been endless predictions about what the outcome
of Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit against the former president might mean for him
— his candidacy, his many ongoing court cases,
his wallet, his ability to shut up. Now that we have a verdict, we’ve
gotten the answers, or at least some of them: He will be $83.3 million poorer and seems to have stopped insulting her as a result. For now, at least.
But
as I sat in court in Manhattan last week, watching Mr. Trump glare and
mumble at the back of Ms. Carroll’s head — she sat two rows in front of
him, pin straight in her chair, the first time she’s been near this man
in nearly 30 years — I couldn’t stop thinking that this trial was also
about something else: the value of a woman, long past middle age, who
dared to claim she indeed still had value. Just how radical was it for
Ms. Carroll, 80, to demand that she was worth something?
To
understand this aspect of the trial, mostly overlooked by a courtroom
packed with political reporters, it helps to review what the case was
not about. As the judge said repeatedly,
the case was not meant to relitigate whether the 1990s assault in a
Bergdorf Goodman dressing room occurred. That was decided in a separate
trial last May, when a jury of nine found Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse
when he pinned Ms. Carroll against a wall, pulled down her tights and
stuck his fingers into her vagina. The jury in that case also found that
he defamed her when he called her a liar and the whole thing a hoax.
What
this jury was to decide was how much Mr. Trump should be punished for
continuing to repeat those falsehoods, as well as what it would cost to
compensate Ms. Carroll for both the emotional damage inflicted by years
of being a target of a former U.S. president (she sleeps with a gun
beside her bed) and the loss of her reputation as a journalist whose
livelihood relied on trust and facts. After a short deliberation, the
jury awarded her $65 million in punitive damages, finding Mr. Trump had
acted with malice, as well as $18.3 million for emotional harm and
reputational damage.
It’s that last
part that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba seemed intent on demeaning and
diminishing — attempting to paint Ms. Carroll as a faded careeristwhose
rape claim was a last-ditch effort to re-establish her career. In fact,
Ms. Habba argued in cross-examination, hadn’t Ms. Carroll’s reputation
improved? She had more Twitter followers now and famous people
commending her; after being fired from Elle, she took her advice column to Substack,
where she now makes more money. Wasn’t that pretty good for somebody
who might otherwise, say, be at home knitting with her cats?
After noting Ms. Carroll’s current income, Ms. Habba continued, “I hate to ask you this, Ms. Carroll, but how old are you?”
“I’m 80,” Ms. Carroll replied coolly, repeating what everyone in the courtroom already knew.
“And that’s more than you were making in 2018,” before the accusation? Ms. Habba asked.
“Yes,” Ms. Carroll said.
When I talked to Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern whose book “Credible”
examines why we disbelieve allegations of sexual abuse, she told me
that Mr. Trump’s team was “trying to show that she was already past her
prime,” that she had “withered on the vine and so whatever was left of
her wasn’t enough to warrant a hefty damage award.”
She
also told me there is no precedent for a case like Ms. Carroll’s, in
part because it is so unusual for a woman her age to come forward. Part
of that has to do with stigma (people are deeply uncomfortable with the
combination of older women and sexual assault, and Ms. Carroll was 52
when the assault took place) and also with statutes of limitations.
But it makes her “all the more radical,” Ms. Tuerkheimer said — an
80-year-old woman proclaiming she wasn’t done yet, that her reputation
was worth something and that she was owed money from the person who’d
trashed it.
“Ageism” is not a word
that’s been used much in either of Ms. Carroll’s cases. But age — how it
shaped her behavior in the aftermath of the assault, how it eventually
propelled her to come forward and how it has been used to discredit her —
has been an undercurrent of her story from the beginning.
Ms.
Carroll got her break in journalism in the 1980s, at a time when few
women were doing the kinds of first-person stunts for magazines like
Rolling Stone and Esquire that she was. Her assignments often put her in
precarious situations: trekking through the mountains of Papua New
Guinea for a Playboy article, “In Search of Primitive Man,” or in a hot
tub with Hunter S. Thompson, who sliced off her clothes with a knife.
(She has said they were “semi-intimately involved” anddid acid together.)
Part
of what made her so good at the work was her thick skin, her
unflappable nature — character traits that would come back to haunt her —
and part of it was her willingness to be outrageous, to do anything for
the story. But as every good advice columnist knows, people contain
multitudes; they can push boundaries in some ways and bend to the
standards of the day in others.
During
the first trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers zeroed in on these contradictions.
Why, his lawyers asked, peppering her with questions to the point of
tears, didn’t she scream
when Mr. Trump attacked her? Why didn’t she file a police report or see
a therapist? How could she possibly have laughed on the phone with her
friend Lisa Birnbach, whom Ms. Carroll called that day to tell what
happened, and who didn’t tell another soul about it for more than 20
years?
“I was born in 1943. I am a
member of the silent generation,” Ms. Carroll testified. “Women like me
were taught and trained to keep our chins up and to not complain.” She
didn’t scream in that department store dressing room, she said, because
she “didn’t want to make a scene.” She laughed when Mr. Trump attacked
her because “laughing is a very good — I use the word ‘weapon’ — to calm
a man down if he has any erotic intention.” She went back to Bergdorf
Goodman, repeatedly, in order to prove a point: It was her favorite
store, and she was not going to let him take that from her — something I
witnessed when I first met her, on a street corner three days after the
accusation, and she grabbed my hand and led me to where it happened. As
Ms. Birnbach put it when she testified in the first trial, Ms. Carroll
is the kind of person who “puts on lipstick, dusts herself off and moves
on.”
Which is exactly what she did, for more than two decades. Even after she came forward in 2019, Ms. Carroll was hesitant to call herself a victim or her rape a rape. The first time I interviewed her,
she couldn’t say the word out loud; she whispered it to me from across
the table. “I like the word ‘fight,’” she told me. “That’s how I like to
say it. Not a rape. To me, it’s a fight, because I didn’t just stand
there.” She was not part of a generation of women who shouted about
their abortions or talked about their assaults out loud.
And
yet even now, even after we supposedly do know that anybody can be
assaulted — that you don’t have to be young or hot — it was sobering to
watch as her own legal team seemed to take every opportunity to remind
the jury that she was once that: displaying her headshots, her book
covers, the now infamous black-and-white photo of her laughing with Mr.
Trump (the one in which he later confused Ms. Carroll for his ex-wife
Marla Maples), as if to say, “See? She could have been his type.”
What
makes what Ms. Carroll did so remarkable is that she was, of course,
worth less in the eyes of the world now than she was in her prime. She
wasn’t retired — “Never,” she told me — but she certainly wasn’t
trekking across the jungle in search of primitive man, and the hundreds
of letters to her advice column each week asking her how to find a good
man had tapered to a trickle. The chutzpah required, after all of that,
and in the face of both her biological reality and a culture that most
certainly doesn’t look kindly on women her age, to still insist she was
worth something … it was ballsy enough to be almost Trumpian. Until, of
course, you appreciate that a fight over the financial value of a
reputation at age 80 is really less about your earnings and more about
your dignity.
If age has in some ways
been a hurdle for Ms. Carroll to overcome in this case, I’d like to
think that it was also age that let her see it through to this
conclusion. That it was age and wisdom and the confidence that comes
along with it that allowed her to make the genuinely audacious claim
that an 80-year-old woman still has good, creative, vivacious, maybe
even profitable years ahead of her.
“I couldn’t have done it back then,” she once told me, of coming forward sooner. “I didn’t have the guts.”
But now? “It was just time. It was time,” she testified.
After
the verdict on Friday, I rode in a town car uptown with one of her
sisters and Ms. Birnbach. They were en route to the offices of Ms.
Carroll’s lawyers, where they planned to celebrate the verdict with
Veuve Clicquot. Her sister scrolled through reactions to the verdict on
social media and began to read them aloud.
“Hero.” “An inspiration to women.” “Accountability.”
And then, predictably: “Deranged old hag.”
The difference, from just a few minutes before, was that they could laugh about it now. There were worse things to be.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of an author. She is Fran Lebowitz, not Lebovitz.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Jessica
Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times.
She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of
“Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” @jessicabennett•Facebook
