Dress for success - Martha's Vineyard Times

Posted: 29 Jan 2020 10:55 AM PST

Sarah Vail's efforts to make dresses for girls around the world came about through happenstance. She heard about Hope 4 Girls through a friend who had attended an event about 10 years ago at the high school, where people had gathered to make dresses for the organization. She looked it up online, and discovered they are an international nonprofit whose mission it is to put a new dress on every girl in roughly 90 countries. They go to expected places like Africa, but also Israel and Russia as well. Hope 4 Girls has two aims: One is to give the girls self-esteem and self-worth with a new dress, and the other is to protect them from human trafficking. Vail explains, "If they have a nice dress and it has a label on the outside with the name of the organization, that gives the girls some kind of protection, because then someone thinks, 'Oh, if they are taken, they are going to be missed.'"
Learning about Hope 4 Girls motivated Vail to action because, as she says, "Human trafficking is a subject I'm really interested in. I really want people to know that it's not just in other countries, it's here too, and it's big. The whole cause is very near and dear to my heart. I have two daughters, and it's unimaginable that this happens to girls in the world."
So, four years ago, when she became the family and consumer science teacher at the Edgartown School, Vail got her fifth graders to help out. She showed them videos and talked about the endeavor to "gather some excitement and steam for them to make these dresses." They took the dresses as far as they could, but by year's end, they weren't complete.
"I kept them for a year, figuring I'd finish them or I would get teachers to help," Vail says."I ended up meeting Aase Jones from Vineyard Haven, who wanted to embellish them, and they were beautiful. She put a lot of lace on them, and they were amazing." Vail sent about 30 off, and the organization was ecstatic.
She put the remaining unfinished dresses in a box and promptly forgot about them. It was just before last summer, when Vail was packing up her classroom, that she came upon the box in her closet. She reached out to the West Tisbury library about hosting a gathering to finish up the dresses. It was held over the weekend. The women who came out to help embellish and complete the dresses all said they came because they wanted to support the cause, like other women who support the project from across the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, Scotland, and Uganda.
Hope 4 Women International, which has distributed more than 450,000 dresses, states on its website, "We care about the world's future women. So we imagined a world where every little girl owns at least one dress. We believe that every girl deserves the dignity of owning at least one dress. We started with pillowcase dresses, and have since advanced to more trendy styles, made from sturdy cotton fabrics to ensure that the dress will not only bring great joy, but will be well-made and sturdy enough to last for a very long time."
Vail says she would like to do the project every year. Sounds like important work.

You can learn more at h4wi.org/ministry/dress-girl-around-world.

A Woman Who Accused Trump Of Rape Is Now Seeking His DNA To Test Against Genetic Material Found On Her Dress - BuzzFeed News

Posted: 30 Jan 2020 12:21 PM PST

Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, who said Donald Trump raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s, are seeking a sample of the president's DNA to determine whether it matches genetic material found on the dress she wore during the alleged assault.

On Thursday, her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, filed court documents calling on Trump to submit a sample on March 2 in Washington, DC, for "analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress" Carroll wore that day.

A Jan. 8 laboratory report attached to the notice said that DNA recovered from the right sleeve of the dress was a mixture of four individuals, Carroll and three others, including at least one male. The report said a number of individuals whose names were redacted were eliminated as potential contributors to the mixture.

"This case turns on whether Donald Trump lied when he said that he had not sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll and, in fact, had never even met her," Kaplan said in a statement. "As a result, we've requested a simple saliva sample from Mr. Trump to test his DNA, and there really is no valid basis for him to object."

The lawyer representing Trump in the case did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment.

Carroll, a writer and advice columnist, filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in November, saying he lied when he denied her rape allegations.

In June, Carroll released a new book, an excerpt from which was published in New York magazine. She alleged Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room about 23 years ago.

In the dressing room, Carroll alleged Trump grabbed her arms, pinned her against the wall, pulled down her tights, and "thrust his penis" inside her, according to court documents.

After Carroll came forward, Trump denied the allegation and claimed he had "never met that person in my life." He also accused her of making up other allegations — Carroll had also accused disgraced former CBS CEO Les Moonves of sexually assaulting her — and said the Democratic party must have been involved.

In a statement Thursday, Carroll said that after Trump allegedly sexually assaulted her, she took the black dress she had been wearing and hung it in her closet where it stayed until last year when she wore it for the New York magazine photo shoot.

DNA does degrade over time but, if preserved well, can last millions of years. Genetic material has been obtained from evidence in decades-old cases to use for testing. In 2013, investigators linked the man they believed to be the Boston Strangler, who murdered 13 women in the 1960s, to old fluid samples taken from one victim's body and a blanket from the crime scene.

"Unidentified male DNA on the dress could prove that Donald Trump not only knows who I am, but also that he violently assaulted me in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman and then defamed me by lying about it and impugning my character," Carroll said.