“Prima Facie,” a searing new play on Broadway, is about a high-flying woman whose vitality and confidence is taken from her twice, first when she’s raped by a colleague, Julian, and then when she tries to seek justice. Jodie Comer — Villanelle on the cult TV show “Killing Eve” — plays Tessa, a swaggering self-made British barrister who often defends men accused of sexual assault, before she’s assaulted herself and ends up on the other side of the legal process. The story is schematic and the script, by the end, turns didactic, but Comer’s blazing, magnificent performance elevates the show into greatness. She makes you feel viscerally both Tessa’s extraordinary life force, and the leeching of it.
I kept thinking about “Prima Facie” as I sat in the Manhattan courtroom where E. Jean Carroll is suing Donald Trump for battery and defamation stemming from a rape that she alleges occurred in the mid-1990s. The barrister defending Tessa’s rapist accuses her of making up the attack because of a professional vendetta. He suggests she could have screamed, and uses her fragmented memories to make her seem dishonest or unreliable. “The lived experience of sexual assault is not remembered in a neat, consistent, scientific parcel,” Tessa says. “And because of that, the law often finds the evidence ‘unbelievable.’”
We don’t yet know what the law will find in Carroll’s case. Both sides rested on Thursday — the Trump camp declined to call a single witness — and closing arguments are scheduled for Monday. I am, frankly, a little worried, not because I doubt Carroll and those testifying on her behalf, but because I have no idea what the jury, which consists of six men and three women, will make of the witnesses and their decades-old memories. Whatever happens, the few days I’ve been in court have underlined to me what an ordeal this must be for Carroll and some of the other witnesses, their lives splayed open for public consumption, every seeming inconsistency in their recollections or behavior exploited. No matter how much you hate Trump, this isn’t fun for anyone.
Hatred of Trump is a major theme for Trump’s pit bull attorney, Joe Tacopina. Two of Carroll’s friends, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin, testified that Carroll told them that Trump had assaulted her shortly after it happened. Both have the same feelings about Trump as almost every New York City woman I know, which is to say they loathe him; Birnbach once compared him to an “infection like herpes.” Tacopina, who has access to years of their emails and text messages, has tried to use their resistance politics against them, implying that they cooked up a plot to frame the ex-president.