Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Janet Yellen is warning CEOs about the dangers of defaulting on the debt ceiling, the Victoria's Secret fashion show is coming back, and E. Jean Carroll's victory against Donald Trump shows the staying power of #MeToo. Happy Wednesday!
- Justice for E. Jean. In a piece for New York magazine earlier this week, journalist Rebecca Traister pushed back against the narrative that the #MeToo movement is over or dead. Traister wrote about the potential outcome of writer E. Jean Carroll's battery and defamation lawsuits against former President Donald Trump—Carroll says Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s—and argued that if Carroll lost, the result would not mark a failure of a political movement. "Fights for progress unwind over lifetimes, not seasons," she wrote. "Progress is marked by regressions and switchbacks, crushing defeats and galvanizing reactions to those defeats."
But instead of confronting defeat, Carroll and her allies notched a seismic victory yesterday that bolstered the argument that the #MeToo movement lives on. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll (it did not find him liable for rape) and for defamation; he had called Carroll's claim a "hoax" and implied she was too old and unattractive for him to assault. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. (Trump called the verdict a "disgrace" and vowed to appeal.)
