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 “The Adult Survivors Act is the latest step in the state legislature’s reckoning with outdated and ineffective statute limitations for survivors of sexual violence,” Michael Polenberg, vice president of government affairs at New York City victim-support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.

Surrealism is no longer an art movement – it's an attitude to life and design

One of Werner Herzog’s lesser films is about fur trappers in Siberia: big men who sled for eleven months of the year in pursuit of sables, the small and silky martens that live east of the Urals, burrowing in riverbanks and dense woods, emerging at dusk and at dawn. Russian sable—barguzin—is one of the most expensive furs in the world. The trappers make their skis by bending birch with their own hands, the same way trappers have for a thousand years. They see their wives for only a few weeks a year. They seem to have no inner life, neither anxieties nor aspirations: no relationships besides those with their dogs, no goals beyond survival. “They live off the land and are self-reliant, truly free,” Herzog tells us: “No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.” The film is called Happy People.

***

There was a year in which I tried very hard to make a film about the decline of the fur industry in New York City and Connecticut, and all I ended up with was a fox’s foot, a holographic poster for vodka, and a hard drive full of footage that, had I ever finished the film, would have been strung together as an incoherent montage of fragmented memories.

How a 1928 banned novel still acts as a beacon for sexual self-discovery

I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite small) from under her umbrella in a shy, expectant way that made me feel shy and expectant too.

The quiet restaurant we had planned on was closed and so we walked around for some blocks looking for just the right place—which turned out to be a bubble tea shop where we were the only customers. We talked about writing and music; she spoke (matter-of-factly, as I recall) of working on a second book. But more than anything we said, I remember her presence, the pleasure with which she dipped her long spoon into the fluted glass for more sweet tapioca bubbles, the directness of her gaze, the way she listened intently and spoke softly. She was thirty-two years old but she had an aura of impossible youth. Her presence was not exactly big. It was enchanting; I’m thinking of the words Nabokov used to describe a character in the story “Spring in Fialta”: “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable.

***

I blurbed The Torn Skirt when it was published in 2001, calling it a “hot book,” by which I meant like a hot hot hot diary entry, urgent and hormonal and romantic as heartbroken suicide pacts are romantic. But after that first meeting, I didn’t see Rebecca again for a long time. In 2005, I think she sent me a copy of her second book, Under the Bridge, an account of a real-life murder in British Columbia, her home turf. It received several Canadian prizes, including the Arthur Ellis Award for Nonfiction, but (I’m sorry to say) I didn’t get around to reading it. In 2008 she married Herb Wilson (who she met through the writer Paul La Farge) and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was getting a degree in philosophy; their daughter, Ada, was born there in 2009. We spoke on the phone and emailed a little during that time; I’m pretty sure she got me invited to Santa Maddalena, a writer’s retreat run by her mentor and friend Beatrice Monti in Tuscany. It wasn’t until she moved upstate to Red Hook (in Dutchess County) in 2011 that, because of interest plus proximity, we began seeing each other a lot.

The World Cup kicks off today in Qatar. To many people the entire extravaganza is one giant laundromat, a sports-wash of global proportions, designed to rinse clean the dirty laundry accumulated during the gulf state’s decade-long preparation for the event. An estimated six thousand five hundred migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were reportedly killed during the stadiums’ construction in the last ten years. To memorialize them, the Danish team will wear subdued colors and hold black in reserve as its third strip. Yet despite Qatar’s grim politics and dubious human rights record, particularly with regard to LGBTQ rights for both residents and visitors (criticism vigorously rejected by Qatar’s rulers as “slander”), FIFA projects that five billion of us on this dying planet will feel compelled to watch.

This is my sixteenth World Cup as a sentient soccer being. In my lifetime, I’m discounting the 1950 event in Brazil—I was four months old and kicking, but not goal-ward—as well as the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, when either my parents kept it from me or we didn’t have a TV, or we did but it didn’t show the games. I’m also skipping the one in Sweden in 1958, when I might or might not have watched seventeen-year-old Pelé score twice in Brazil’s 5–2 victory in the final over Sweden; my memory isn’t speaking loudly enough on that one (see V. Nabokov, goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, circa 1919–22). No, the World Cup began in joyful delirium for me around when Philip Larkin insisted it did for sexual intercourse in general—“between the end of the Chatterley Ban and the Beatles’ first L.P.” My twelve-year-old self sat stunned, alone (no one in my northwest London family had any interest in football), and perfectly happy, as the Battle of Santiago raged, players from Chile and Italy kicking one another up in the air, landing a few punches, and creating a mayhem that required police intervention on four occasions. The English referee of that game, Ken Aston, is the man who went on to invent yellow and red cards.

Fourteen of my World Cups I watched or will watch on TV. The other two I watched in person—in England 1966, the only year that England won, and in the U.S.A. in 1994, when I traveled the country covering the games, sugar-high on Snickers and Coca-Cola (two of the event’s primary sponsors), for The New Yorker. What I remember most from that monthlong soccerpalooza, aside from Diego Maradona’s brilliant play during a Faustian effort to recapture his lost youth, unfortunately with the help of an ephedrine cocktail, is an enigmatic sign held up by German fans before their country’s game against Bulgaria at Giants Stadium. It read simply, IT’S NOT A TRICK, IT’S GERMANY. The packed stadiums were secured by overzealous security personnel stripping fans of anything that could conceivably be transformed into a weapon. As one of the guards told me, “You can throw a pretzel and you can hurt someone.” In contrast to the raucous crowds inside the stadiums, the cities beyond were more or less devoid of any kind of soccer atmosphere or activity. In Chicago, where the tournament began on June 17, the very day that OJ led the police down an LA highway in his Ford Bronco, it was all Michael Jordan 24-7.

Enough about the past. We are about to step into Qatar’s balmy winter, average 70 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit, with high humidity to be dispersed by serious AC in the outdoor stadiums. Of the more than two hundred national teams that set out on this journey four years ago, only thirty-two remain, eight groups of four, the top two in each group to move on to the knockout stage. The games will run for almost a month, culminating in a final on December 18.. As is almost always the case, Brazil is favored to win, followed by Argentina, France, England, and Spain, and you never rule out Germany. All these countries have lifted the trophy before, and wouldn’t it be great if someone else crashed the party? After all, Croatia (population 3.8 million) made it to the finals the last time out, and the ageless midfield genius Luka Modrić still runs their show. There is always Kevin De Bruyne’s Belgium (population 11.5 million) or, for a real long shot, Africa’s best hope, Senegal.

What does the future look like for Qatar, football, and the people we’ve spoken to?

Kate finds out more about the precarious situation of the LGBTQ+ community in the country and speaks to the only publicly gay Qatari. After officials were in a standoff with Danish broadcasters this week, Kate also explores Qatar's media environment and asks whether this World Cup will – really – be a wake-up call for the football community. Once the spotlight moves on, there are simply no guarantees.

***You can listen back to Episode 1 and 2 - released on the 8th and 15th of November - right here on the Football Ramble feed now.***

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Climate activists in Europe targeted artworks in three locations on Friday, but these protests were a departure from past actions as these works were not protected by glass. The three protests were also for the first time staged to take place on the same day as part of a concerted effort.

On Friday in Paris, Milan, and Oslo, climate activists from local organizations under the umbrella group A22 Network doused sculptures with orange paint or flour, as U.N. climate talks were taking place in Egypt. This time, the works were hit directly, and lacked protective covering. Two instances involved outdoor sculptures. Nevertheless, none of the art pieces were reportedly damaged, though some are still being monitored for possible further cleaning.

At the front entrance to the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection museum in Paris, two members of the French group Dernière Rénovation (Last Renewal) doused Charles Ray’s stainless-steel sculpture Horse and Rider with orange paint. One of the protesters also climbed the life-sized horse and put a white T-shirt over the rider’s torso. The shirt read, “We have 858 days left,” referencing a deadline for reducing carbon emissions.

The hotly debated attacks on artworks by climate activists continue at a fast pace around the world, but until now, most instances have involved art kept behind glass coverings, preventing any real damage. But fears persist that similar acts could potentially do irreversible damage. Earlier this month a joint statement by international museum directors said they “were deeply shocked by …[the] risky endangerment” of artworks in their care in light of this continuing trend.

On Friday, French minister of culture Rima Abdul Malak visited the Bourse de Commerce following the incident, and tweeted: “Eco-vandalism steps up a notch: an unprotected sculpture by Charles Ray was sprayed with paint in Paris.” Abdul Malak thanked personnel who “intervened rapidly,” adding: “Art and environmentalism are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are common causes!”