Carroll was likely under no illusions about what would happen when she told her story.
In her excerpt, she preemptively answers what she knows the public will want to know:
"Did I report it to police?" No.
"Did I tell anyone about it?" Two close friends, both journalists. One said "He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.” The other said “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.”
Did cameras catch it? Carroll says Bergdorf’s confirmed it no longer has tapes from that time.
"I am sick of it," Carroll told CNN. "Think how many women have come forward. Nothing happens. The only thing we can do is ... tell our stories so that we empower other women to come forward and tell their stories because we have to change this culture of sexual violence."
Between Trump's own recorded comments about how he responds to women ( i.e. "grab them by the pussy") and other similar accusations, it doesn't strain my credulity to think he could be a rapist.
But here we are again with another "survivor" offering an account of a decades old crime that can't be verified, because she didn't take the obvious steps to alert the proper authorities and preserve evidence of the crime. Moreover, she seems frustrated by the fact that people have an expectation that she would have done this, and that not having done so hurts her credibility. That is really perplexing to me. I get that making the report would have been emotionally difficult, but seriously, the article makes it sound like there might have been a fucking video tape of the assault at one time, which was just allowed to be destroyed, because no one realized it contained footage of a crime. If you could produce that kind of evidence at a trial, who gives a shit how many lawyers Trump had?
But she did nothing, so now there is no tape, and no real reason to dismiss the counter argument that she is a liar who has ulterior motives. I don't understand how she thinks coming out with the story now, under the present circumstances, will "empower" women in any way.