On May 9, a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual battery against the journalist E. Jean Carroll in a civil trial, ordering the former president to pay her $5 million. They did not, however, find Trump liable for rape. The murky, vexed distinction the jury made in that verdict speaks to what has been one of the central conflicts since Carroll came forward in 2019 — and to America’s persistent cultural queasiness when it comes to talking about rape.

When Carroll first accused Trump of attacking her in her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, she was very clear about the anatomical details of what had occurred in the mid-1990s.

“Still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat,” Carroll wrote, “he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”

Carroll was equally clear at the time that she was not going to call this attack a rape. Instead, she called it a fight.

“Every woman gets to choose her word,” she said on the New York Times podcast The Daily in June 2019. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is fight. My word is not the victim word. I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought. That’s the thing.”