The attrition of attention when it comes to Carroll’s story—“media fatigue,” CNN’s Reliable Sources put it—is in its own way shocking but not surprising. It is yet more proof, as if any were necessary, of how commonly women’s stated experiences, particularly when the statements threaten the fragile order of things, are reflexively dismissed. Once again, the woman offers up her pain—as testimony; as evidence; as fodder for change—and, once again, that pain is met with a shrug. Once again, those who have an interest in disbelieving her—including, in this case, Trump himself—mention money and fame as her probable motivations for coming forward. Once again, the woman’s story is consumed and abstracted and diffused into the acrid air.

What will be the ramifications for the man who has been so accused? Almost inevitably: none at all. (“Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?” Jerry Falwell Jr. was asked by The Washington Post earlier this year. “No,” came the blunt reply.) Carroll is the 22nd woman—the 22nd woman—to make an allegation of sexual misconduct against Trump. Their accusations range from sexual harassment to assault to rape. But their staggering number, on its own, should matter; their staggering number should, in every sense, count, just as the staggering number of accusers did, to varying degrees, with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar and Bryan Singer and R. Kelly, and others. In those cases, the women’s stories, and the men’s, bolstered one another, fighting assumptions and inertias, making the individual claimants more and more difficult to dismiss.

That has not been the situation, however, with the women who have made claims against Trump. Instead, in Carroll’s case, a perverse kind of paradox has set in: The sheer number of women who have accused the president of misconduct seems to have helped diminish the impact of her accusation. The notion of a president who is a sexual predator is profoundly familiar at this point, in part because Trump himself has been caught bragging on tape about the predation. (I moved on her like a bitch. Grab ’em by the pussy. When you’re a star, they let you do it.)

That explains, in part, how a famous woman could make, it is worth reiterating, a credible claim that the president of the United States raped her and see that claim dissolved within a weekend’s news cycle: A news media that is so efficiently calibrated to report that which is new isn’t fully sure how to report on that which is manifestly not new. The numbers give way to a numbness. He said and she said and she said and so did she, and the many, many shes, rather than amounting at least to the sum of their parts, end up canceling one another out. Defeatism sets in. The women’s stories tell us what we already know, and so they fade away.