First, it was Belgium. Then it was Spain. Today, it was Portugal. Morocco has defeated yet another European soccer powerhouse to become the first African and Arab nation to advance to the semifinals in World Cup history.

The final score was 1-0 with the only goal coming off a leaping header from Youssef En-Nesyri late in the first half.

What a moment

Morocco scores its first ever men's FIFA World Cup goal in the knockout stage pic.twitter.com/hGS7QoE3vV

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) December 10, 2022

The Justice Department announced on Friday that Nicholas Ochs, the founder of the Hawaii Proud Boys chapter, was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Nicholas DeCarlo, who was photographed at the Capitol with Ochs, was also sentenced to four years. Both men had previously pled guilty.

Members of Proud Boys, a far-right nationalist group comprised of self-described “Western chauvinists,” have helped promote the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, Proud Boys members from across the country have been sentenced to prison time for their actions during the January 6 insurrection, including one who received a four year and seven month sentence after joining a mob going after Capitol police and coming within seconds of Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In October, a North Carolina leader of the group pled guilty to seditious conspiracy related to his actions on January 6. A New Jersey leader pled guilty to “interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder” the same month.

Before entering the Capitol on January 6, Ochs and DeCarlo threw smoke bombs at police outside, according to the Justice Department. They were then photographed in front of a door inside the Capitol on which DeCarlo had written “Murder the Media,” the name of their social media channel on Telegram. DeCarlo also took plastic handcuffs from a Capitol Police duffel bag.

After leaving the building, Ochs apologized to his audience for not livestreaming the ordeal. “[S]orry we couldn’t go live when we stormed the f—-in’ U.S. Capitol and made Congress flee,” he said.

In a court filing, Ochs’ attorney Edward B. MacMahon said his client “recognizes the gravity of his involvement in the events at the Capitol on January 6.” He described his client as someone who grew up in a “warm and supportive family” before serving in the Marines, getting married, and becoming a father. MacMahon asked for a prison sentence of less than 18 months. 

Kari Lake is still trying to win the election she lost. Her latest move is a conspiratorial 70-page lawsuit filed in Arizona on Friday in which the former local news anchor asks that she be declared the victor of last month’s gubernatorial election because of unsupported allegations of voter fraud.

Lake’s lawsuit in state court argues that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who defeated Lake in November, and election officials in Maricopa County have “shattered” trust in the state’s elections. The results have already been certified by Hobbs, the state’s top elections official. There is no evidence the election was stolen. 

Nevertheless, Lake’s lawsuit demands an “order setting aside the certified result of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and declaring that Kari Lake is the winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.” If the court won’t grant her the victory automatically, Lake asks instead that it forces Maricopa County to “re-conduct the gubernatorial election” under the “direction of a special master.” 

The court is not expected to go along with either demand. Hobbs’ campaign manager called the case a “nuisance lawsuit” from someone who “needs attention like a fish needs water.

A statement from our campaign manager on Kari Lake’s latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.

On the evening of October 24, 2020, a guy who goes by the name Wenyang tweeted a picture of Hunter Biden. Hunter was facing a mirror in what looked like a hotel room, with his penis exposed.

Within an hour, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign asked Twitter to take down the post. We know this because journalist Matt Taibbi—using documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk provided to him—has been tweeting out internal communications between Twitter executives who, at the time, were discussing how to deal with material from Hunter’s laptop. Wenyang’s tweet is the third of five listed in a screenshot of an email from one Twitter staffer to another. “More to review from the the Biden team,” the email said. “Handled these,” a Twitter employee responded a few hours later.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

Taibbi did not explain what those five deleted tweets contained. But using the Internet Archive, you can see that three of them featured explicit images of Hunter Biden. One doesn’t work. Another is a video, which won’t play now, but probably showed sexual activity. All of those I was able to access violated Twitter’s rules.

Workers at an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in Ohio voted Friday to join the United Automobile Workers union, a milestone in the auto industry’s transition from producing gas to electric cars.

The vote at Ultium Cells—a joint venture between General Motors and a South Korean battery manufacturer—was 710 to 16, according to the union. The National Labor Relations Board is expected to certify the vote.

Labor experts told the Detroit Free Press that the election results were unsurprising given the location of the Ultium factory and the strong pro-union strain among GM workers. Still, it’s a major win in a larger battle: making sure that as workers transition to green jobs, they keep labor protections. (Tesla, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the US, is also the only large US auto-maker that’s not unionized.)

Electric vehicle manufacturing workers tend to be paid lower than their counterparts at other auto factories, the New York Times reports, and, without government subsidies, the transition to electric vehicles could cut auto industry jobs. While President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act does offer tax credits for electric vehicles produced entirely in the United States, it does not specifically incentivize the creation of union jobs in electric vehicle manufacturing.

“As the auto industry transitions to electric vehicles, new workers entering the auto sector at plants like Ultium are thinking about their value and worth,” UAW president Ray Curry said in a statement. “This vote shows that they want to be a part of maintaining the high standards and wages that UAW members have built in the auto industry.”

Kyrsten Sinema is back where she started. On Friday, the Arizona senator announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party, but would keep her committee appointments and not caucus with the Republicans. Twenty years after Sinema lost a race for state legislature as an independent, she is once again a party of one.

On a day to day basis, Sinema’s switch doesn’t necessarily change much. Democrats will still control the chamber, they’ll still need 60 votes to pass most legislation, and they’ll still be counting on one from the junior senator from Arizona. She will no longer be attending caucus lunches, but that’s really an issue for the catering staff. No one paying attention to Democratic politics or Capitol Hill would have characterized Sinema as a party loyalist over the last few years—or even the last decade, really—and she has gone out of her way to distance herself from the state and national Democratic parties time and again. In one sense, her announcement makes official a dynamic that has for a long time been frustratingly apparent to her critics.

The switch does change one big thing, though. Although she did not address this aspect of her future in an op-ed this morning in the Arizona Republic, nor in interviews with Politico and CNN, Sinema’s move upends what was already expected to be one of the 2024 cycle’s most competitive and expensive Senate races. Her popularity among Arizona Democrats has fallen through the floor over the last two years, due to Sinema’s opposition to changing Senate rules to push through key party priorities, like expanding voting access and preserving abortion rights. She was censured by the state party in January over her vote to preserve the filibuster. Activists have protested outside her office and even confronted her in a bathroom at Arizona State University. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego was reportedly gearing up for a primary challenge. His colleague, Rep. Greg Stanton, the former mayor of Phoenix, tweeted an internal poll that showed him beating Sinema in a primary 58 to 17.

In a statement on Friday, Arizona Democratic Party chair Raquel Terán acknowledged Sinema’s work on “several historic pieces of legislation” but accused her of falling “dramatically short” when it came to protecting voting rights and curbing corporate power:

As a party, we welcome Independent voters and their perspectives. Senator Sinema may now be registered as an Independent, but she has shown she answers to corporations and billionaires, not Arizonans. Senator Sinema’s party registration means nothing if she continues to not listen to her constituents.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent. Politico has the scoop, which you can decide is either unsurprising or something of a bombshell. The news comes shortly after two key moments for Democrats. This week, Sen. Raphael Warnock won re-election in Georgia, securing the party with a theoretically more powerful advantage in the upper chamber, and Sen. Chuck Schumer was chosen again as majority leader.

Speaking to Politico, Sinema attempted to downplay the “timing” of her announcement, claiming it was rooted in some recent soul-searching of how she could best champion her core values. 

“Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she added.

While it’s easy to scoff at Sinema’s reassurances here, in some ways,  they’re less mealy-mouthed than they seem. Because regardless of how you feel about her absolute refusal to end the filibuster (and in doing so, torpedo Democrats’ efforts to protect voting rights); her donations from venture capitalists while killing tax hikes for the Wall Street set; or even that heinous thumbs down, Sinema’s claim that her behavior will not change once she leaves the party would have to mean that she was working in lockstep with Democrats to begin with. Not really her thing.

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in his excellent profile of the Arizona senator, Sinema’s political career has been one giant metamorphosis. She’s gone from the Green Party roots to unlikely Dem powerbroker. She once claimed donations were a form of “bribery;” now she enjoys friendships with the private equity crowd.

The day after Donald Trump, a former president and the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, called for the “termination” of provisions of the US Constitution governing elections and essentially demanded that he be declared the “rightful winner” of the 2020 election, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post ran a front-page story reporting Trump’s call for ripping up portions of the nation’s founding document. No mention of this even appeared in the Times that day. Trump’s unprecedented and dangerous statement was not deemed a big deal. This raised a question: Have major media players still not figured out how to cover Trump’s extremism?

In recent weeks, Trump has dined with a Hitler fanboy and an antisemitic rapper, embraced the bonkers QAnon conspiracy theory (the world is run by an evil cabal of Democrats and elites who are baby-eating pedophiles and sex-traffickers!), and vowed he would, if returned to the White House, pardon the January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted the US Capitol. All of these developments have been reported on by the top news organizations. Yet the coverage does not seem to capture fully the danger posed by a wannabe-tyrant validating forces of hatred and irrationality. He won the GOP nomination and presidency once; he could do so again.

The first story each paper published on Trump’s “termination” comment focused on the reaction to Trump’s outlandish remark. The Times cooked up an odd formulation, telling readers that Trump’s “extraordinary antidemocratic statement…drew a degree of bipartisan condemnation over the weekend, with a flood from Democrats and a trickle from Republicans.” The only GOP “condemnation” cited in the piece came from a newly elected GOP House member who said, “Well, obviously I don’t support that.” This hardly amounted to even a trickle of Republican denouncement. More significant was that most Republicans had said nothing. And this was a rather conventional approach to a rather unconventional event, emphasizing the political angle not the remark itself and its implications.

The Washington Post’s initial coverage similarly was a report on the White House blasting Trump for this statement. It was headlined, “White House rebukes Trump’s suggestion to suspend Constitution over 2020 election.” (Perhaps it’s a quibble, but “termination” seems to go even beyond “suspend.”) Politico did the same. (“White House to Trump: ‘You cannot only love America when you win.’”) Axios also zeroed in on the reaction. (“Lawmakers condemn Trump’s call to suspend Constitution.”)

There was nothing wrong with these articles. But they followed the same-old/same-old formula: Trump does outrageous thing X; friends and foes say Y. Rinse. Repeat. The issue was not whether Republicans would find a way to distance themselves from this remark but whether they would disavow Trump for suggesting the Constitution be terminated. The party’s allegiance to a fellow who had just espoused a dictatorial sentiment was a key element of this story.

On Thursday, the Reverend Robert Schenck testified before Congress about the anti-abortion influence campaign he ran targeting the Supreme Court, recounting the bombshell revelations that have clouded the highest court in scandal first reported in November by the New York Times. While speaking to the lawmakers, Schenck shared a new detail: that at least one justice knew about his efforts—and approved of them. 

“Justice Thomas commended me,” Schenck recalled of one interaction, “saying something like: ‘Keep up what you’re doing. It’s making a difference.'”

For two decades, Schenck ran a secret operation designed to embolden conservative Supreme Court justices in their resolve to overturn Roe v. Wade. When he began in the late 1990s, Schenck believed that the conservative justices felt alone and disfavored in the media and needed “shoring up.” So he got an office across the street from the court, bought access to the justices by joining the court’s nonprofit Supreme Court Historical Society, and recruited wealthy donors, whom he called “missionaries,” to befriend the conservative justices. “We wanted to create a circle of people around them that would encourage them, applaud them, literally thank God for them and assure them of prayerful support,” he explained Thursday, “and by being present, indicate to them that there were many, many people—Americans—who were behind them and hoped that they would render strong, unapologetic, opinions that would support the positions important to us.” One couple recruited by Schenck to do this work successfully became friends with Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia and their wives, even vacationing with them at their home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Schenck’s revelations have further punctured the illusion that the justices are above the political fray, deciding cases only according to their view of the law. The trips, meals, and friendships Schenck helped orchestrate show how the lack of ethics rules at the court makes the justices vulnerable to pressure campaigns that could sway their rulings. Schenck told the Times that he instructed his “missionaries” not to mention him or his group, Faith and Action, to keep his affiliation hidden. But the allegation that Justice Thomas knew what Schenck was doing raises new possibilities: not only were justices subjected to stealth lobbying by wealthy friends, at least one of them may have approved of the operation.

Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) asked a clarifying follow-up about Thomas’ alleged comments. He wanted to know what Thomas meant when he said them.

In a vote Thursday morning, the House passed a bill that would enshrine same-sex and interracial marriage in federal law. All Democrats voted for the bill, as did 39 Republicans. Democrats pushed the legislation after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the constitutionality of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision granting the right to same-sex marriage, in his concurring opinion in the decision striking down Roe v. Wade.

The bill, called the Respect for Marriage Act, already passed in the Senate, and it now heads to the desk of President Biden, who is expected to sign it into law.

Biden has come a long way since voting for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, in 1996. In 2012, as vice president, Biden became the first Obama administration official to endorse same-sex marriage.

A different version of the bill passed in the House in July, before the midterms. Since then, seven Republicans switched their votes from “yes” to “no,” while two—Reps. Mike Gallagher (Wisc.) and Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.)—flipped in the opposite direction.

NOW: Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have the honor of presiding over the debate on the Respect for Marriage Act.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have a rich and powerful supporter in his expected presidential campaign: Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Or, he might not.

Despite reports that Musk would back DeSantis in 2024, the delivery of the message gives pause: Musk announced (if you can call it that) his DeSantis support vaguely with a one-word tweet. Asked by a user if he would support DeSantis for president, Musk responded: “Yes.” 

That’s it.

This is not the same thing as Musk announcing his preferred candidate—as the New York Post quickly interpreted the tweet. I suppose it is an indication of where Musk is headed politically. But we’ve had ample evidence of that for some time.

Voters in about two dozen Georgia counties began voting today in the Senate runoff between Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Trump-backed challenger Herschel Walker, despite attempts by the Georgia Republicans to block Saturday voting.

The election will determine whether the Senate remains split 50-50 with Democrats in control, or whether Democrats will take a 51-49 majority that will ease their ability to confirm judges and move legislation through committees. 

Originally, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had allowed voting the Saturday after Thanksgiving, then changed his mind and issued guidance prohibiting it. But the Warnock campaign sued, arguing the prohibition was contrary to Georgia law. On Wednesday, the Georgia Supreme Court allowed voting to begin Saturday. Their effort was opposed by state and national Republicans.

Voting began Saturday with long lines across the state as voters decided to take advantage of the extra day of voting. “We had to take them to court just so you could vote today,” Warnock said at a campaign stop Saturday morning.

Early voting opportunities are especially important in a runoff election because there’s little time to vote by mail. Mail ballots must be received by the time the polls close on the date of the runoff election—December 6—making it difficult to request and return a mail ballot in time. Election officials and voting rights groups are therefore urging Georgians to vote in person.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump, now a candidate for president, had dinner with the white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, to wide condemnation.

Fuentes first gained notoriety for attending the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He was one of “very fine people on both sides,” as Trump said at the time. As my colleague Ali Breland cataloged last year, Fuentes has a sizable track record. He has denied the Holocaust, opposes interracial marriage, and wishes for a return to Jim Crow segregation, among other racist beliefs. Fuentes recently said he’d prefer a Catholic monarchy to a democracy.

"Fuck democracy," Fuentes says. "Divorce, abortion, ghettos, crime, political correctness, diversity… track record of democracy, not so good. Catholic autocracy? Pretty strong… Catholic monarchy, just war, inquisitions and crusades: pretty good, pretty good stuff" pic.twitter.com/zsZktiZVt6

— Sam Hoadley-Brill READ CHARLES MILLS. RIP (@deonteleologist) November 25, 2022

Despite all this, Fuentes has been partially accepted by the Trump wing of the Republican Party. Earlier this year, he hosted Reps. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) at his America First Political Action Conference. (He drew press attention to the event by comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler—before adding that he meant this as a “good thing.”)

Among the most-discussed aspects of Herschel Walker’s campaign for the US Senate seat in Georgia are the allegations he had episodes of violence and threatening to commit violence—allegations he later dismissed as the side effects of a mental illness known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, from which he now claims he is “healed.” 

Walker’s ex-wife Cindy Grossman, for example, said in 2008 that Walker once held a gun to her head and threatened to “blow [her] brains out.” This allegation resurfaced during Walker’s campaign against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, which will now conclude in a runoff on December 6. Voters have also learned that on a separate occasion, Grossman’s sister claimed in an affidavit that Walker told her he was going to shoot Grossman and her new boyfriend.

Christian Walker, Walker and Grossman’s only son, condemned the trend of athletes inflicting or threatening violence—a trend in which his father has allegedly participated. He called it America’s “pandemic of professional athletes abusing women, children, and animals” in a 2021 tweet.

We have a pandemic of professional athletes abusing women, children, and animals, but their employers would rather gaslight fans into thinking the athletes are victims of a “racist society.”

— Christian Walker (@ChristianWalk1r) November 18, 2021

Things looked scary at first for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the GOP senator at the top of Donald Trump’s enemies list. After crushing her opponent in the primary, Murkowski found herself behind Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka for days after  polls closed on November 8th. But by Wednesday night, as the state’s ranked choice voting tabulation concluded, Murkowski soared to a 54–46 win.

Alaska was never going to be a Senate seat that flipped blue—at least not in this election, where the state’s new ranked-choice voting system puts the competition between two Republicans: Kelly Tshibaka (pronounced “Chewbacca,” or pretty close) and incumbent Trump-impeacher Murkowski. Pat Chesbro, a Democrat, trailed far behind with just over 10 percent of first-choice votes. Despite Murkowski’s vaunted independent streak, that’s still about 86 percent of Alaskan voters picking a Republican as their first choice. For now, that puts a hold on the wishes of anyone hoping to see the far north go purple.

But Murkowski’s win should still come as a huge relief for Americans who care about preserving democracy—she’s the only surviving Republican senator in this general election who voted to impeach Trump. 

Let’s consider who we almost had: Tshibaka, the Trump and Alaska GOP–endorsed candidate. In her campaign ad, she stands silhouetted against a mountain range, ice floes crashing behind her, looking like the Alaska version of a Gilead housewife as she talks about her parents being temporarily homeless and how she’s the first in her family to get a college degree—both claims that have been debunked by Alaska journalist Dermot Cole. Then we cut to Kelly in what we assume is her home kitchen, where she declares, “I’m a conservative: Pro-life, pro–Second Amendment, and America First.”

Tshibaka’s tried to position herself as a Washington outsider, despite spending nearly 20 years inside the Beltway, working for various federal inspectors general, before her return to Alaska in 2019 (just enough time to establish residency for a Senate run). While she acknowledges that President Biden is, well, president, she also thinks there are still “unanswered questions.” Although Tshibaka was smart enough to scrub her social media before announcing her Senate candidacy, CNN reported that she’d used it to spread baseless conspiracies about voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

For decades, it’s been unthinkable that Alaska could let a Democrat occupy its only seat in the House of Representatives, which had been held by the late GOP Rep. Don Young since 1972. But in the background, as Americans in the lower 48 were captivated by races in Georgia or Arizona, that’s exactly what’s happened: Alaskans voted 55-45 in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former state legislator who just won her first full term over celebrity ex-Gov. Sarah Palin.

Peltola’s had just enough time to drop off her suitcase in Washington after winning the seat in an August special election. Palin was also her main opponent then, and in the months since, Peltola only grew her lead. She was helped in part by ranked-choice voting in its Alaska general-election debut. The system, which transfers votes to second-choice candidates when a voter’s first pick is eliminated, has drawn national attention and sometimes controversy.

Elections are a long affair in the 49th state, where challenges like distance, isolation, and tough weather abound, and mail-in ballots that are postmarked by election day have up until ten days to arrive for counting. The Alaska Division of Elections doesn’t count absentee, mail-in, and questioned ballots—many of which come from rural, predominantly Alaska Native regions—until after election day.

It’s not a system that benefits election-denying extremists like Palin, and Palin is not a good loser.  The ex-governor has been hinting since polls closed that she’ll challenge the results of the race. She was sowing doubt and misinformation about ranked-choice voting as early as August, as I reported at the time: 

“It’s bizarre, it’s convoluted, it’s confusing and it results in voter suppression,” Palin told the CPAC crowd. “It results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it’s so weird.” None of that is true. Maine has been doing ranked-choice voting since 2016, and several cities and municipalities around the country have also adopted the system. “There isn’t a higher rate of incomplete or spoiled ballots in ranked choice races compared to ballots in elections using plurality voting,” Amy Fried, a professor of political science at the University of Maine, told Mother Jones. “Nor is turnout lower.” Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at the New York University School of Law, noted, “There’s no evidence voters have been confused or don’t understand how to rank candidates one, two, three.”

In less than 10 days, two mass shootings in two different cities have taken place in Virginia. On November 13, three students at the University of Virginia were killed after a classmate allegedly gunned them down following a field trip. Then on Tuesday, a suspected gunman opened fire inside a Walmart break room, killing at least six people and injuring four, before allegedly killing himself. 

But does Glenn Youngkin know any of this? 

In several statements responding to the shootings, the state’s Republican governor condemned the acts of violence. He also expressed heartbreak and extended prayers. In one interview with Fox News, Youngkin appeared to blame the scourge of mass shootings on a “mental health crisis,” recycling the familiar Republican talking point.

But as many have pointed out, Youngkin appears to have avoided the words gun and gunman entirely when describing both shootings. In fact, a quick search of his tweets revealed that Youngkin has never referred to the words “gun, guns, or gunman,” at least from his official social media account.

But here’s a collection of what he has said since the November shootings:

The United States will block shipments of raw sugar from a top Dominican producer with close ties to two wealthy Florida businessmen after finding indications of forced labor at its sprawling Caribbean plantation. Sugar from the Central Romana Corp.’s cane fields feeds into the supply chains of major U.S. brands, including Domino and the Hershey Co. 

The ban on all imports from Central Romana went into effect today.

“Manufacturers like Central Romana, who fail to abide by our laws, will face consequences as we root out these inhumane practices from U.S. supply chains,” said AnnMarie R. Highsmith, executive assistant commissioner at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade in a press release. 

The company is owned in part by the Florida-based Fanjul Corp., a global sugar and real estate conglomerate. 

The federal investigation found five indications of labor abuse among cane cutters employed and housed by Central Romana: abuse of vulnerability, isolation, withholding of wages, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime. Central Romana’s plantation shipped more than 295 million pounds of raw sugar from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. last year.  

For years, former president Donald Trump has been able to push off a lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a writer and advice columnist who says he raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. When Carroll decided to come forward—describing the alleged assault in a book excerpt in 2019—Trump had been president for two years, and the statute of limitations to bring criminal charges or a lawsuit against him had long since passed. Carroll sued Trump for defamation instead, arguing that he’d smeared her in statements to reporters in which he denied he knew her, accused her of fabricating her story to sell books, and insulted her appearance—and has spent years tied up in court, fending off interference from the Justice Department and endless bids for delay. 

Now, Carroll and thousands of other sexual assault survivors in New York state are getting a new chance to seek legal accountability against people who harmed them years or decades ago. Under the Adult Survivors Act, New Yorkers who were sexually assaulted as adults but who have run out of time to seek accountability in court will have a one-year “lookback window” to sue their abusers, as well as institutions that were negligent in responding to the assault. While many states have experimented with lookback windows to allow child sexual abuse victim to bring civil claims, the New York law marks only the second time such a grace period has been extended to people who were adults at the time of the assault. (New Jersey was the first.) In a way, the new law is an acknowledgement of the many barriers—ongoing trauma, shame, and fear of retaliation, not to mention ineffective policing—that have prevented survivors from pursuing justice in court. “The fight against sexual assault requires us to recognize the impact of trauma within our justice system,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said when signing the bill.  

Until 2019, survivors of second- and third-degree rape in New York State had just five years to get a prosecutor to file criminal charges against their assailant, and typically, even less time to pursue a civil lawsuit. The statute of limitations was extended that year, but it didn’t apply retroactively, meaning that many survivors never had a chance at a court verdict or settlement. “The Adult Survivors Act is the latest step in the state legislature’s reckoning with outdated and ineffective statute limitations for survivors of sexual violence,” Michael Polenberg, vice president of government affairs at New York City victim-support organization Safe Horizon, in a recent webinar. Survivors will have one year to file their suits. 

In 2019, New York opened a similar look-back window for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. By the time the window closed in 2021, nearly 11,000 lawsuits had been filed under the Child Victims Act, including 3,336 cases involving the Catholic Church. And while many are still ongoing, some have reached settlements: Prince Andrew, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, settled a Child Victims Act claim by Virginia Giuffre in February, weeks before he would have been required to sit for a deposition about her abuse allegation. While most lawsuits were filed against relatively deep-pocketed institutions that had allegedly covered up or enabled abuse, some survivors filed against individuals: a former a Lutheran pastor, an elementary school teacher, and others. One plaintiff, who won a $25 million jury verdict against a now-80 year old Boy Scout leader, told a Buffalo News reporter in March that the verdict was meaningful not for the money because jury had believed him and validated experiences. “I probably won’t get a penny out of this, but putting a dollar amount on it makes people know how horrendous it was,” he said. 

As the Child Victims Act lookback period came to a close in 2021, survivor advocates undertook a massive effort to pass a similar bill for adult victims. One obstacle: intransigence in the state Assembly, as former Gov. Andrew Cuomo still clung to power amid a torrent of sexual assault and harassment allegations. It took until May 24 of this year—months after Cuomo ceded the governorship—for the act to pass and be signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. (Cuomo continues to deny the allegations against him. Whether he might face a lawsuit under the new law is still unclear; Charlotte Bennett, a former aide who was one of the first to come forward against the governor, didn’t need it for her lawsuit against Cuomo and his top staffers, since the statute of limitations had not yet expired.)

The doctor strides through Greenwich Village at rush hour on a December afternoon as if leaning into the wind. He is tall, lean, young—34—with longish wavy dark hair, charcoal eyebrows, a Roman nose. Carrying a raincoat and backpack, he appears vigilant. If violence were to erupt, he would be more likely to sprint towards a car crash or gunshots than away, in order to render first aid. Deferential and polite, a fellow who cherished and was cherished by his mother, who led the funeral prayers at her town mosque and hated to place great distance between himself and her final resting place by leaving Syria for America. Salim (a family name he is using to protect his privacy) refrains from bringing up his personal history unless asked.

Few Americans ask.

If someone does ask, he gives them time to reconsider and wander off, perhaps under the pretense of seeking a coffee refill. He understands that, for most Americans, the complexity and the preposterous cruelty of the narrative will feel overwhelming.

While a medical student, Salim served as a paramedic treating commonplace cases like heat stroke and ankle sprains until, in 2011, the country exploded with demonstrations and state repression. In time, he made it to the US and began a public health graduate program. Now a doctoral candidate, he focuses on health systems and population health in conflict and post-conflict settings.

On this early evening in mid-December, Salim has accepted an invitation to a small holiday party on a tree-lined street near Union Square. His host, Arien Mack, is the Alfred J. & Monette C. Marrow Professor of Psychology Emeritus at The New School, which is down the block and where she has taught since 1970. Barely five feet tall, she’s described by many as “formidable” and for the last half-century has had an up-close view of the tribulations and griefs of imperiled intellectuals. She has invited Salim and a dozen other endangered scholars to her home this evening in her capacity as founding director of the New University in Exile Consortium. It’s to be their first in-person gathering since the onset of Covid. Mack launched the Consortium in 2018 as an in-person and virtual meeting place for members of the intelligentsia peeling away from repressive countries. All her guests tonight fled their homelands to avoid imprisonment, assassination, or (in Salim’s case) orders to join the perpetrators.