On Friday, in response to a lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s “anti-weaponization” fund—which would have directly funded the work of antiabortion extremists. The $1.8 billon fund’s announcement explicitly identified antiabortion extremists convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act as presumptive recipients—the same FACE Act violators Donald Trump pardoned in January 2025.
The restraining order against the fund is intended to make sure that no funds are distributed before the lawsuit brought on behalf of the National Abortion Federation; Andrew Floyd, a former Jan. 6 prosecutor; professor John Caravello of New Haven, Conn.; and Common Cause, a government accountability group, has a chance to play out. It will pause the fund’s establishment until at least June 12.
“President Trump wants to take your hard-earned tax dollars and hand them over to criminals, cronies, and insurrectionists,” said Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón in a statement announcing the lawsuit against the fund. “It’s unconscionable, and more importantly, it’s illegal.”
This week, the Justice Department announced that it is opening a criminal investigation into writer E. Jean Carroll over whether she committed perjury during depositions tied to her civil lawsuits against Donald Trump. The move comes after two juries found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation against Carroll. And, as critics were quick to point out, it is clearly just the latest move in Trump’s broader campaign of retribution against his political and legal adversaries.
There couldn’t be a better time to watch Ask E. Jean, a new documentary from director Ivy Meeropol about E. Jean Carroll that tackles not just Carroll’s cases against Trump, but her career as a writer, and “how insidious … misogyny is,” in Meeropol’s words. Delving into Carroll’s archival material “really delivered in telling the bigger story that we were trying to get at, which is that from the minute we’re born, we are confronted with having to look at ourselves through how men are perceiving us,” says Meeropol.
Read more from her, or revisit last year’s interview with E. Jean and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan on our On the Issues With Michele Goodwin podcast:
The insidiousness of misogyny is such that, whether it’s present in Trump’s prosecution of his enemies, the legal system’s broader treatment of women who accuse powerful men of sexual abuse, or even its role in men’s acts of mass violence, it often goes overlooked.
“While supremacist beliefs regularly appear with such intersections of multiple dehumanizing and conspiracist ideologies, [news] coverage often appears to struggle with this, focusing on one ideological strand and neglecting the other elements of the belief system,” wrote Alex DiBranco in her analysis of the reporting on the recent tragic shooting at a San Diego mosque. Media coverage of the tragedy has largely overlooked the fact that both shooters’ manifestos specifically identified mass shootings that predominantly targeted women among their inspirations, and used language popular among misogynist online communities.
Even if the mainstream media doesn’t tell the whole story, Ms. will always examine the ways that patriarchy and misogyny inform the world around us—and we’ve been doing it since 1972.
