By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive To Rense
1-18-24

As a former New Yorker, here I get into shopping etiquette New York elitest style prior to the cheapening of mass marketing. Proper clothing was more selective and expensive back then than the present era of cheap garments made in China, Bangladesh and other export-oriented sweatshop and sold (and resold) online. There are several factors that support Trump’s innocence in this questionable case (which should never have been accepted by a court of law). Immediate forced entry when both participants are in a standing posture is biologically difficult and clumsy (as shown in reproduction of farm animals). The biology of female fertility obviously weighs against a single-stroke rape, when the female accuser was at the time approaching menopause at 50 years of age, taken by surprise and lacking preparation with a lubricant. In the Big Apple emerging out of an economic depression and overrun by eager young women from the Midwest, South, Europe and Latin America, a famous tycoon like Trump would have no urgent need for a late middle-aged twice-divorced flat-chested and bony scandal journalist. So go figure: Who’s really lying?

The other obvious question is: Why did she not scream in outrage, which would have caused the elite department store’s dressing-room attendant to summon a house detective? The scene of the alleged attack in the early 1990s was the Bergdorf Goodman department store, one of New York’s elite establishments which had its own security system against shoplifters and bizarre perverts (for instance men who urinate on women’s garments), along with potential rapists. I go into further detail here, which apparantly Trump’s legal team failed to do (such as calling on testimony from former security staffers at that esteemed department store).

Crawling out of the New York City deficit

As a former New Yorker (in that period of time), allow me to clarify the actual urban conditions during that era some three decades ago (a long, long time in the past, when considering the changes wrought by the 911 demolition of the World Trade Center) as a corrective to Ms. Carroll’s false memories or perhaps her sinister lies. By the 1990s New York was only starting to emerge from a decade of deficit and decline, trying valiantly to recover its former position as America’s premier city instead of a dumping ground of garbage and dog poop and illegal immigrants on its sidewalks.

The public areas of the Big Apple were depressing (even Central Park was deteriorated), although not for newcomers, especially Midwesterners like Miss Carroll to constantly fantasize (indeed her girlie newspaper column resembles the fictional columnist Carrie in “Sex and the City” with its feminist coital dreaming out of touch with urban communities under economic siege.) Those were the stereotypical Anglo newbies who did not go salsa dancing at the Puerto Rican clubs (the latter legendary today, being long gone ) or have to work underpaid jobs in garment district. Those sort of eager less-than-innocent girls flocked to the Ocean Club back then, rather than CBGB’s punk rock dive. On dates, they proved to be tiresome at conversation although eager for action.

Fashion in its prime

The scene of the dressing-room “rape” was the posh Bergdorf Goodman department store, which certainly was not some low-end WalMart or Esprit outlet (a defunct once-popular sportswear outlet that pioneered clothes made in China and then went financially bust due to its greedy yuppie owners). Among the elite purveyors in Manhattan, Bergdorf was a paragon of stylish taste with the latest in fashion and top quality in those days when elegant women’s wear arrived from workshops in France and Italy commissioned by top designers and fashion houses such as Dior and Chanel. Hand-stitched and intricately adorned evening gowns of highest craftsmanship were priced in the thousands of dollars. Wealthy patronesses paid without batting a mascaraed eyelash. Lingere from top European producers were super expensive as compared with today’s sports underwear from sweatshops in China, Vietnam, India and Latin America. Price indicates a difference in the detailing. (My editorial work and cultural experiences in New York enabled me to later serve as a news editor and fashion writer as well as opera and art critic in Tokyo and Hong Kong.)

The risk of damage to high-priced and very delicate clothing, along with the lurking possiblity of shoplifting, meant that top-tier department stores (unlike today’s box stores) were protected by layers of security measures, which included a strict one-person to dressing booth policy (husbands were not allowed inside the women’s area) and a limit on average of only three articles of clothing for try-on. Immediately outside the dressing room doors, a clerk was posted to collect the clothes for immediate hanging in a wardrobe closet and to assure the client of assistance (for instance, to zip up a gown). That sort of personal attention to detail does not exist today in a degraded era of readymade throwaway clothes resold online.

Every floor of a posh store was monitored by sales clerks in their respective departments. Meanwhile, secretly, undercover “store walkers” (inspectors in civilian garb) circled the premises on watch for deranged individuals who thrilled at burning cigarette holes through women’s clothing or looters trying to stuff clothes items under their jackets or into their pants.The clerks and walkers were in intercom range for summoning store detectives (most of them retired cops), who’d rush to an attempted theft scene in seconds (not just minutes) to escort the offender to a back office to await arrest by the NYPD or, in case of elite family members, settlement with a huge cash payout beyond the price of goods. Crazed shoplifters were cuffed, to be dragged off into an in-house holding room where kicking and shouting was halted against the wall. Then they went out the back door into a police car. Bull-crap appeals to ethnic “rights” and outcries of “discrimination” were laughed at as a nonsensical demand for legal immunity. The prisons were full of thieves serving maximum sentences. By contrast, nowadays the criminals “own” the store, taking whatever they want by threatening law suits for racial discrimination. Since nowadays every item is basically worthless, the system goes along with the sick charade.

New Yorkers were a tough breed back then, as compared with today’s tolerance for ethnic looters in their quest for so-called racial justice (never mind equality), who believe it’s their political right to grab and run without paying a cent. Justice, how the meaning of that word has changed - into its opposite. In those days common sense when prevailed, but oddly Ms. Carroll, who was born and raised in the boondocks of Michigan, took no notice of the tough urban reality that surrounded her. A thoroughgoing investigation, including with her divorced husbands, will disclose that she’s a scammer. (Her criminal record needs to be surfaced.)

It is simply impossible for a horny man to penetrate a woman or molest a child inside a dressing booth without being immediately captured, arrested and awarded a prison sentence by the Bergdorf staff angered about the in-house hanky-panky that requires calling over the janitor to mop the booth. Based on my experience with such close-quarters maneuvers, scoring on the first thrust into a standing body inside a narrow dressing room is possible only if she is an experienced hooker with wide hips gladly assisting with the entry, albeit on the second, third or fifth attempt. Given human physiology, it’s hit and miss like a game of darts, not scoring the bulls-eye until getting down to the usual crouching position, which is what flexible knees were invented for, other than praying. The notion of a stand-up single smooth entry thrust in a dark closet, the legendary hole in one, is the stuff of wishful porn movies and ancient British pornography, like that novel about the perfect whore “Fanny Hill”. Then there’s the question: So then what came next?

She (Jean, not Fanny) says nothing happened after that, nada, no follow-up. Well, lady, that’s because it’s customary for the female partner to bend over and hold on to her toes while groaning in ecstasy. Or at least faking it. Is Trump a robot like R2D2 who just turns the knob and then is done? It’s possible, however, that Trump’s a golfer who dreams of a hole in one, something basically unattainable without the aid of angels or demons. Once scoring an improbable, indeed impossible one-holer, it’s time to quit and head for the club house for a drink of whiskey in celebration. So tell us, Jean, what happened after? Zip and run? The scenario is so ridiculous as to indicate Miss Carroll is perpetrating an amusing and incriminating lie for an astounded jury, who is expected to award her millions for the entertainment at Trump’s expensive. It’s also known as perjury.

An American Icon

At the time, the mid-1990s, Donald Trump was not a mere moral but one of the celebrated Reagan Era’s larger-than-life heroes of American capitalism whose business dealings and personal tribulations against the New Jersey region’s mafia thievery were legend. Although a fast-rising multimillionaire, he was also considered a down-to-earth man of the city, who would order his limo to stop on the corner of 6th Avenue (at a short but important distance from the entrance to The Plaza Hotel) to order a hot dog from a street vendor and eat it with a lot of toppings. On my way back to the Metropolitan Museum, where I worked as a research librarian, I sometimes saw him leaning forward to avert mustard from dripping onto his suit and necktie, and like other city dwellers shouted a friendly: Hey, there Don!” Soon done, he’d jump into the limo, which would whisk him away to a business meeting to plan a better future for the Big Apple.

Perhaps it’s mere coincidence that I’ve met another such scammer woman also from Michigan, about the same age as Ms. Carroll who was recently discovered to have been involved in a slew of property fraud in the Southwest. Even on my first encounter, I noticed something disturbingly inarticulate about her, as if hiding secrets of her past, much like a female version of the Great Gatsby, a person with much to lose from the truth. Whatever the final verdict in this aberration of law and media ethics, the situation now arises to uncover the hidden facts and dark relationships behind an aged (she was born 80 years ago in 1944) Ms. Carroll’s attempt to defame Mr. Trump, three decades after her alleged sexual encounter, which never happened except in her own demented imagination. I truly hope than my mother will never act in such a disreputable manner and being a lady of self-worth even the thought of such public disgrace is impossible. Being now far from the scene of the crime, I urge fellow journalists, especially those in New York, to uncover the hidden facts behind the sordid accusation and the questionable accuser, as in “who put her up to this caper?” One never knows what will be dug up inside and outside that kangeroo court. A second trial will find Mr. Trump to be an innocent victim of libel by a doddering lunatic. The judge in this first case should be defrocked.

A note in passing: the vain Miss Carroll was 55 years old at the time of the fictive “rape”, whereas proud Donald was a mere 47, a difference of an unthinkable eight years atop the variants in their characters. As put by Jane Austen: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”