E. Jean Carroll Discusses Trump’s Comeuppance

Since losing a civil case to the journalist, who accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has doubled down on his attacks.
E. Jean Carroll in a black turtleneck and white textured blazer
Photograph by Sarah Blesener / NYT / Redux

After decades of showing disdain for the rule of law, Donald Trump may finally have encountered the intimations of his demise, in the form of E. Jean Carroll, the former advice columnist for Elle magazine. According to Carroll, Trump raped her in the mid-nineteen-nineties in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman—a department store situated, as it happens, on Fifth Avenue, precisely where Trump had always said he could commit any crime he wished and “wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.?” Trump leads the field of Republican Presidential candidates for 2024, and his confounding hold over tens of millions of Americans persists, but it’s now sinking in that his campaign schedule will be regularly inconvenienced by depositions, indictments, trials, and judgments that he won’t be able to ignore or dismiss.

On May 9th, a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll five million dollars in damages in a civil case against Trump. Though the jury did not find sufficient evidence of rape, it did hold Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. (He is appealing the judgment.) On Monday, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, filed court documents seeking at least another ten million dollars in a separate case, because the former President, at a live town hall on CNN “doubled down” on defaming Carroll. I spoke by Zoom with Carroll and Kaplan on Tuesday for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Carroll was at her cabin in the Hudson Valley; Kaplan, who goes by Robbie, was in her office, in New York City. I asked Carroll if she thought the judgment against Trump in her case—to say nothing of the legal jeopardy he faces in other courts—had finally eroded his façade of invulnerability and self-possession.

“I think we’re ending it,” she said. “Now it’s not just Robbie Kaplan, me, and the nine jurors. I think people are starting to recognize that when Donald Trump defames someone, or when Donald Trump lies, people tend to believe it, and they act on it. So, hence, they attacked the Capitol when he said he won the election. They attacked me because he said I’m a liar. . . . I think people are going to get pretty sick of ‘figuring out’ that Americans are acting on his lies.” She added, “The one way to stop him is to make him pay for lying. And if he were made to pay for ‘shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue,’ I don’t think he would’ve shot him. Money is precious to him, and Robbie is going to go get some of his money for his lying.”

Was this Trump’s moment of comeuppance?

“I think it just may be,” she said.

Carroll’s emotional experience in recent weeks has been one of radical highs and lows. “The happiest day of my life was on May 9th,” she said. “Robbie and I stood in that courtroom and heard nine jurors respond that we had been telling the truth. The moment of joy was so incredible. It was like a new world had opened up to me.” Carroll and Kaplan went to Kaplan’s law offices to celebrate. There was music, champagne, food, dancing, tears. “The next day, we are just getting used to being so happy in a new world. And I was so tired from being happy. I was in bed when CNN started with the former President.” Carroll said she slept through Trump’s smug and bullying session with the anchor Kaitlan Collins and a loyal audience of New Hampshire Republicans.

“The next morning . . . it was like being hit by a deluge of hatred on Twitter,” she said. “And I didn’t understand what was going on.” Kaplan sent Carroll a transcript of the CNN town hall and she finally read Trump’s remarks calling her a “wack job” and claiming that she had retailed a “fake story.” Trump claimed that Carroll had named her dog or cat (he couldn’t remember which) “Vagina.” He had a theory of the case: “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?”

The transcript was plenty shocking to Carroll, but what she could not sense fully was the sound of people laughing along with Trump’s insults and accusations. When she later watched footage of the town hall, she admitted, it was painful to hear the laughter that followed Trump’s comments, but she understood. “People believe what he has to say, and they’re going to go along with it,” she said. “And so the plunge was thorough. It was just an absolute plunge from heaven—and it’s an old song—from heaven into hell, boom. But I quickly climbed out.”

Although Carroll has regained her sense of vindication and triumph, she is still shaken by the crowd’s derisive laughter. “It was not a slap against me,” she said. “It was a slap against almost every single woman who was hearing him. Every woman who’s just been ‘merely’ pinched or grabbed. And then the guy laughs and denies” what he’s done. “Hearing him saying those terrible things about me—I'm sure they were hurt like I was.”

Kaplan told me that, despite her latest filing against Trump, she doubted that he would cease making attacks and slurs directed at Carroll. “Not in the near term, I don’t think he will,” she said. “I don’t think he can help himself, honestly. I don’t think he has enough development of the frontal lobe of his brain to do that.”

Were there any legal mechanisms to force Trump to stop attacking Carroll? “You won’t be surprised to learn, it’s very rare, for a defamation defendant who’s lost, to continue the defamation,” Kaplan said. “So there’s not a lot of case-law precedent for this. There was an option, and there still is an option, to seek what’s essentially a gag order. And great First Amendment experts, like Floyd Abrams, have told me that this would be maybe the best possible case, to get such a gag order. But even if we were able to succeed, there’s no question it would be wrapped up in appellate issues for years and years, and there would be serious First Amendment concerns.” The other avenue, which Kaplan chose, was to seek additional punitive damages.

It is hard to discern what percentage of the millions of Americans who say they will vote again for Trump would join in the laughter at E. Jean Carroll’s expense. She said she chooses to remain upbeat.

“I love this country. I love how the federal court worked. I loved how the jury worked. I love it. We got a bad egg here, Donald Trump,” she said, adding that she thought her case might help to persuade voters, particularly in swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, to abandon the former President even though “there’s a lot of women-haters in this country.”

Carroll said she hoped that she and Kaplan and the jurors who sided with her will help demonstrate that “Donald Trump is a liar. He dragged me through the mud and he ground my face into the dirt. And yes, it happened, he raped me. I think we can turn just enough women and men at the polls to make sure he doesn’t become the next President.”

Carroll is seventy-nine. She just adopted a new dog, a Great Pyrenees. “She’s right here, Miss Havisham, Sham for short,” she said, gesturing offscreen.

“My life goes on. . . . I will go on living in this tiny cabin,” Carroll said. “But one thing has changed. I am going to dedicate myself to somehow figuring out a way for the women who don’t have my platform to hold men accountable. Robbie and I are going to put our heads together.” She continued, “That’s how my life is going to change. I’m a crone. I’m an elderly woman on a mountaintop. But I think we’ve got a few good years left to figure out a way to end the culture of sexual violence. That’s what I want to do.” ♦