E. Jean Carroll Speaks—and She’s Throwing Darts All Across Trumpworld
In the six years since she first wrote that real estate scion Donald Trump slammed her against a wall in the mid-’90s and fingered her in a department store dressing room, E. Jean Carroll has been reduced, as every woman stepping up to charge rape is, to a caricature of sexual essence. Is she pretty? Hot? Rape-able?
“Not my type,” said the president when asked about her story in 2019, even though, in a deposition, shown a photograph of her, he risibly confused her with another ethereal blonde, his own second wife. But reductio ad T&A has always been Trump’s favorite deflection strategy with women, as well as being his old commercial stock in trade: One of the promises he made—and kept—before entering politics was mandating “higher heels and smaller bikinis” for women in his beauty pageants.
Besides Trump’s megaphone for personal insults, Carrol had to confront the “victim” label that is so distorting to a woman’s self-image and that afflicts any woman who accuses a sexual predator, whether president or janitor.
Her new book, Not My Type, about suing and beating Trump in court is, from title to last page, an admirable act of subversion, casting the female gaze back at the bubble of pomposity and arrogance and entitlement around one man and his team and their processes, reducing the narcissist to his insecure essence.
This book is full of mischief; it’s also erudite and serious. Carroll calls herself an optimist who loves to laugh, and laugh she does as she weaves bits of outrageous court transcript and her own observations on the courtroom scene, which she recorded contemporaneously in audio notes to herself before going to bed at night.
The book is also an “old woman’s” shout, in some ways the female version of old man Trump’s “fight fight fight.” It opens with a scene in which Trump lawyer Alina Habba is demanding that Carroll list all her former lovers. She studies Habba’s Chanel suits and colossal diamond ring (noting that her husband is suing the jeweler over the cost). She recounts how, as Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina looked her in the eye and suggested she not only “hates men” but “abominates men,” she was musing about the amount of pumped iron it took to build such a sweaty, bull-like neck.
The book is funny, but also serious. In practice for court testimony, her lawyers showed her some of the hundreds of death threats posted to her on Facebook, evidence they planned to enter into the second defamation trial and asked her how they made her “feel.” Carroll couldn’t think of any words as she reread posts like “i will rape u, e jean carroll” and “I’m so very sorry; my friend wants to kill you and I cannot stop him. Rest in peace cunt.” The lawyers eventually dispatched her to talk to a therapist who advised her not to struggle for a cogent thought, but to “go to the body” and just describe the physical effects of fear.
After the verdict was read, Carroll writes that she restrained her “joy so wild” until outside the courtroom with her team—at which point she erupted “despite the fragile splendor of my age, despite the fact that women do not win lawsuits, I let out a shout so loud that it must reach Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in his robing chamber, because everybody shushes me.”
Nobody shushes her much anymore. Trump has had to put up $91.6 million in escrow while his lawyers execute dwindling legal maneuvers to avoid paying the sexual abuse and defamation judgments awarded by two separate juries of his peers.
At a book party in attorney Roberta Kaplan’s Manhattan office on June 24, the anti-Trump culturati was out in force—agents, publishers, editors, boldfaced names like Rosanna Arquette, Ellen Barkin, Mary Trump. Also two key trial witnesses: author Lisa Birnbach and television anchor Carol Martin. Both were brought in to testify that Carroll told them about the assault shortly after it happened. (Their presence reminded all that by custom if not by law, it still takes multiple women’s testimonies to equal a man’s. Like Carroll, they fielded death threats and still do.)
At the party, Kaplan had just come from a hearing at which Team Trump was throwing a Hail Mary pass to the 2024 Supreme Court presidential immunity decision to save Trump from having to pay the judgment. His lawyers are contending presidential immunity applies, since he trashed her via the White House press office. Lower courts have so far not bought it, but Trump is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The day after the book was released, I interviewed Carroll in a Manhattan hotel room. A tempest was crashing down on Manhattan, and rain slashed at the twelfth-floor windows. Inside, clad in a white airman’s flight suit, Carroll poured tiny glasses of Chartreuse, and periodically stopped to clink glasses.
Edited for space, here is our conversation:
Burleigh: So where are you getting all these flight suits? Because the last time I saw you, you had an orange one on.
Carroll: I got five in the closet. From actual Army surplus. They’re not designer jumpsuits. I got some collectibles in there. The orange one was from the ’60s. The blue one’s from the ’80s. You know, because fuck, if he can put tanks on the street, Nina, I can put a flight suit on my body. And we’re in a fight.
Burleigh: What’s up with the Chartreuse?
Carroll: It’s medicinal. It’s got one hundred thirty herbs, bark, flowers. My lawyer gave me a bottle when I was insomniac during the trial. It works. You know, these monks made this since the 1500s. I don’t drink. I don’t drink a lot. (sips) Isn’t that fucking great?
Burleigh: Talk to me about your choice to describe in the book all the “fabulous” clothes you wore. Isn’t that kind of a female cliché?
Carroll: The woman’s body is always the center. And so I took that fact and turned it. And if you notice in the book, I wrote about what everybody had on in the trial. I wrote about the runway. I wrote about Joe Tacopina and the inside of his jacket. I wrote everything that Alina was wearing. I got it back. You know, I’m like, this is what I wore, but this is what they wore. And as women, every woman reading this, knows: What we put on our bodies tells the world who we are, tells the world. And that’s just a fact.
Burleigh: What was your take on Tacopina?
Carroll: He was disgusting. You know, he’s a great defense lawyer. I mean, Trump hired the best defense. He hired the guy who defended the guy who bludgeoned Natalee Holloway; got him out of jail for fifteen years. Michael Jackson, this guy got him acquitted. Tacopina was way too good for this case. But he followed Trump’s orders and he lost. Trump hired him because he beats up on Black women. Because he beats up on grandmas. As with the Stormy Daniels case, Trump hires lawyers to say what he wants. Tacopina probably would have lost that too. Let’s toast that. Cheers! We’re drinking shark juice. It’s going down well.
Burleigh: People forget you had a great career as a writer. This book is kind of a reminder.
Carroll: I was a fucking workman, a magazine writer in New York. We could go anywhere, do anything. I had a pair of jeans and cowgirl boots and a jacket and a shirt. And we didn’t have Instagram. We didn’t know we didn’t look fabulous. We just looked fabulous. And we went everywhere. We were out on the boulevards at, what, 4 a.m. We were at the brasserie having coffee at 3:30. We just, we fucking lived, and we owned this town.
Burleigh: What do you hope people take away from this book, and your experience?
Carroll: It drives me crazy when I hear liberals say [Trump’s] just stupid. He’s not stupid. He’s one of the smartest people of his generation. He now controls the United States of America. Never underestimate Donald Trump. I knew enough to be able to be an old woman and beat him twice. But I cannot see into the future. I think that if women got together, because we control like 55 percent of the wealth in this country, particularly older women, control a lot of the wealth. You have something here that if we rally the women, particularly the older segment, because the poor thirtysomethings have to hold down two jobs. I was trying to talk Mary Trump into stepping up and leading him. Would you like to join me in asking Mary Trump to stand up and start leading? Somebody needs to lead. The women. We’re rudderless. But we have money. We need a leader.
Burleigh: What do you make of right-wing women right now; they seem pretty empowered.
Carroll: Alina Habba, deliciously arrogant. Didn’t know a fucking thing about the law. Didn’t know diddly squat. And yet, she is vice president of his PAC. She got to help get him elected because she’s overwhelming, confident. We can learn. Why should we be frightened? We’re smarter. We’re richer. We have a vastly different experience, deeper experience. We’re just going to wake up, get off our lazy asses.
Burleigh: You really walked in there with a lot of confidence, head high.
Carroll: It’s always physical with me. I’m not particularly smart. I’m not particularly well organized. But what I am is physical. I know, you know, the minute I stand up I’ve got to do something. If I do this, fucking watch out. That’s why I want Democrats to fucking stand up and leave the house. We all fucking sit on our fat, lazy asses.
Burleigh: When did you know you were going to write a book?
Carroll: My editor gave me permission. And I just started off with Alina Habba asking me to list my lovers. That was it. I just needed to get it started, and then I understand I was in a high comedy. I had all the transcripts. So I was in the middle of a high comedy. I had all the lines. In a play, in show business, you have what the actor is saying and then you have the actor’s business. And so I had both. I knew what they were doing, I knew how they walked, I knew how they talked, because I had all the notes. I’m very optimistic, as you know. So the book turned out to be funny about a very serious topic. And some of the scenes were deadly serious.
Burleigh: And the metaphor of the courtroom as runway?
Carroll: We’re in New York. It’s the fashion capital of the world. We’ve been to fashion shows. It’s nothing compared to that, because Judge Kaplan had the great criminals of our time. John Gotti. One of the great dressers right? Prince Andrew. Who dresses better? I mean really. And then we had in my trial the attorneys, they were just so delicious. The attorneys all got new outfits. You know Judge Kaplan always had a new shirt and a nice tie every day. Tacopina blew everybody away.
Burleigh: What are you going to do with the money if and when Trump pays up?
Carroll: I’m going to give it all away to causes he hates.