Justine McCarthy’s column in The Irish Times yesterday. It’s great reading. What are her chances of entering the United States?
Yesterday Trump published on Truth Social a picture of Barack Obama and his wife with heads replaced with heads of monkeys. The US president is a vile man. It has since been removed.
Thank you Justine for you Friday column.
With impeccable choreography, the Melania movie was unleashed in cinemas on the same day as the release of the Epstein Files – the Final Avalanche. The former showcases the ultimate Stepford wife for the cast of leading men appearing in the latter.
According to universally-derisive reviews, Melania, a documentary for which the nominal US first lady was paid the obscene sum of $28 million (€23.7 million), demolishes any hope that under that big hat is a head swilling with profound thoughts. Looking stunning and saying nothing really is the sum of Missus Trump’s functions.
Though at 55 she would have been four decades past it for Epstein’s delectation, she is the photofit of discretion for the rich and powerful men he mustered in his orbit. There was former US president Bill Clinton who did, actually, have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky; Elon Musk, Grok owner and father of 14 children by four women; Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who claims he is incapable of sweating; Peter Mandelson, aka the Prince of Darkness and Britain’s erstwhile ambassador to the US; film director Woody Allen, married to his former partner’s adopted daughter; Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates; former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak; and Brett Ratner, Melania’s vanity-movie director, who is captured hugging a woman he says was his then-fiancée on a sofa beside Epstein in one of the released photographs.
Donald Trump’s name is all over the documents, though – as in the other cases too – in no incriminating sense, by legal definition. He is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 million for reporting that he sent the sex trafficker a 50th birthday greeting by way of a drawing of a naked woman. The sketch was in an earlier dump of Epstein documents. The files are extensively redacted, hiding the identities of powerful men and women who rubbed shoulders with the odious child abuser Epstein. The department of justice denied similar consideration for his victims, dozens of whom have been identified with publication of their personal information, including their images and home addresses.
Not every woman in this horror story is a victim. Epstein’s consort Ghislaine Maxwell is a convicted sex trafficker. Others, like Mette-Marit, Norway’s crown princess, and Sarah Ferguson, are royals or royalty-adjacent. This is a parable of gender-and-class prejudice.
The Epstein saga exposes the contempt that gilded global networkers reserve for the woman of the species, particularly the less privileged members they adjudge to be not-wife material. According to the New York Times, many of Epstein’s under-age victims came from broken homes and poor backgrounds. Some had previously suffered abuse. “They were viewed as disposable people,” the newspaper states.
If only those girls and women had a champion in the White House who could intercede on their behalf. Someone, say, with ready access to the president’s ear and a worldwide audience.
But for Melania to open her mouth would risk smudging her lipstick, so she keeps it shut. She has nothing to say about Project 2025, the blueprint for her husband’s second reign of terror in the White House, starting with his attack on gender equality policies.
She has nothing to say about America’s clampdown on women’s reproductive rights. Nothing to say about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) shooting an unarmed mother dead in her car. Nothing to say when her husband lectured pregnant women to “tough it out” because, he wrongly asserted, they could give their children autism by taking a Tylenol painkiller. Nothing to say after her husband trivialised domestic violence as “a man [having] a little fight with the wife”.
Nothing to say when a jury concluded her husband sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll. Nothing to say about the post- coital hush-money he paid to Stormy Daniels. Nothing to say after he was asked would he stay with his wife if she was disfigured in a car crash and answered: “How do the breasts look?”
Granted, being married to such a man is a terrible cross to bear. Watching the one- time model from Slovenia in the decade since Donald Trump first became US president, the hope endured that someday she would erupt in righteous fury at his objectification of womankind.
Her intervention would be significant in an age when war crimes against women and girls go unpunished, violent pornography is big business and the internet’s corner boys preach misogynistic vitriol, putting woman lives at risk. Melania’s nearly two-hour-long documentary was an opportunity to make that difference. Instead, she used it to parade her partiality to expensive fabrics and staggeringly high heels.
This woman once sparked a fashion frenzy by wearing a jacket emblazoned on the back with the message, “I really don’t care, do U?” It transpires she wasn’t lying. The emperor’s wife has only clothes.
To borrow from Noel Coward’s advice to Mrs Worthington, mothers would be well advised not to let their daughters – or sons – near Melania’s stage. Unless one’s burning ambition is to become a shiny trad wife, there are more inspiring role models on the silver screen.
The Pelicot Rape Case: A Town on Trial stars French woman Gisèle Pelicot. She made a difference when she waived her right to anonymity to ensure that her husband’s trial for drugging and raping her and inviting more than 70 other men to rape her too would be reported around the world.
Or go and see The Voice of Hind Rajab, the true story of a five-year-old Gazan girl’s agonisingly slow death in a car full of her dead cousins, killed by Israeli soldiers who also killed the ambulance crew trying to rescue her. “Mummy, I need to go to the toilet,” the child told her mother on the phone as she lay dying among the corpses.
Unlike Melania, Ask E Jean, a documentary about Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump for sexually assaulting her, did not get a razzmatazz cinema release with branded popcorn. In fact, you won’t find it in any cinema, because everyone’s too scared of Donald’s revenge.
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice reignited the Epstein scandal when it was published after Virginia Giuffre’s death by suicide last year. “Passed around like a platter of fruit” by Epstein and his pals, she survived long enough to rock the world with her revelations. Because, for her, saying nothing was not an option. Because saying nothing is collaboration.
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