Jen Percy and E. Jean Carroll with Jessica Bennett: Girls Play Dead

Overview

Award-winning journalist Jen Percy sits down with E. Jean Carroll — one of the most influential voices in the national conversation about sexual violence, accountability, and the pursuit of justice — for a conversation with New York Magazine’s Jessica Bennett about Percy’s recent book, Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation — a powerful examination of how women survive sexual violence.

After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body’s passivity. Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Girls Play Dead explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered cultural myths. Percy takes on taboo subjects — orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity — illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.

Like Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and Janet Malcolm, Percy is a fearless cultural critic with a talent for wresting deep truths from lived experiences; E. Jean Carroll, whose sexual assault and defamation cases against Donald Trump led to landmark civil court verdicts, has been a powerful advocate and for women facing down their abusers. Together, they expand the language available to survivors and helped to recast our culture’s perceptions of victimhood and empowerment.

In a candid discussion about the book between two friends, moderated by Jessica Bennett, hear Percy and Carroll examine the cultural myths that continue to shape how we understand survivors, the challenges of speaking publicly about sexual violence, and why expanding the language around trauma is essential to fostering empathy, justice, and lasting change.

“Jen Percy has captured, in the most lyrical and authentic way possible, what it means to be a woman alive today.” — Rachel Louise Snyder