The Bizarre Logic of the "She's a Slut" Defense

Who's more likely to lie about sex? Someone who enthusiastically has a lot of it, or someone ashamed by it?

Last week, Stormy Daniels testified in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, this one for a hush-money payment he allegedly made to keep their sexual encounter a secret. In the defense’s cross-examination of Daniels, they tried out a familiar tactic: Suggesting that, because she is a woman whose sexual history is not exactly one of Christian chastity, she is more likely to be lying about a sexual encounter.

Daniels has appeared in several adult films, and has also written and directed quite a few. This is a fact that Trump’s defense was virtually guaranteed to try to use against her. Despite the fact that most Americans watch porn, Americans (and people just about everywhere) remain pretty uncomfortable with porn, with sex generally, and with unapologetically sexually active women particularly. The idea that you can’t trust a promiscuous woman has been standard fare in rape cases for centuries — along with the related conclusion that you can’t rape a promiscuous woman.

Daniels wasn’t accusing Trump of rape, although the details she shared certainly made their encounter sound less than consensual. The question, though, wasn’t one of consent; it was whether sex happened at all. Daniels says it did; Trump says it didn’t. And that’s why Daniels was on the stand.

During cross examination, Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, asked Daniels, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real?”

Daniels laughed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s not how I would put it. The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

Necheles continued: “You have a lot of experience in memorizing these fictional stories?”

To which Daniels responded: “I have experience in memorizing dialogue, not how to have sex — pretty sure we all know how to do that.”

Daniels held her own. But the implication was clear, and it’s a familiar one for any person who has ever followed a very public sexual assault case: A porn star can’t be trusted. Just like a sex worker can’t be trusted. And a sexually active woman can’t be trusted.

As far as I can tell, there’s no actual evidence that a woman’s sexual history has any bearing on her likelihood of telling the truth about sexual assault. But the conventional wisdom is that the more chaste a woman, the less likely she is to lie about being raped (or, in Daniels’s case, about sex generally). When you pause to think about it, though, this totally defies common sense: Isn’t someone who has done something many, many times over, enthusiastically and without complaint, less likely to lie about doing that thing than someone who perhaps feels that thing is shameful or stigmatized or bad, and may be a whole lot more likely to feel guilty and embarrassed for having done it?