E. Jean Carroll’s Book Is Like No Survivor Memoir You’ve Ever Read
When E. Jean Carroll stepped into a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996, she epitomized a certain flavor of late-20th-century Manhattan. She’d gumptioned her way from a childhood in flyover country to a journalism career. Her origin story is inspiring: At 38, in a shed in Montana, she’d scrutinized a photo of Fran Lebowitz talking on an old dial phone in Vogue magazine. With a magnifying glass, she’d deciphered Lebowitz’s phone number, then called the writer up and suggested they do a story for Outside magazine in which Carroll took Lebowitz camping. Lebowitz bit, and the rest is history.
Or, at least, history of a certain kind, the kind also enshrined in Graydon Carter’s aptly titled recent memoir, When the Going Was Good. Back then, you could make a fine living writing features for glossy publications fat with expensive ads. Magazine people tooled around the city in the back of car-service sedans, ate at fashionable restaurants, and mingled at glittering parties. Carroll—by 1996 ensconced in a sweet long-term gig as Elle’s advice columnist and host of a cable TV show—thought her chance encounter with a real estate developer and local celebrity might yield, as she would testify in court decades later, “something light and fun and comedic and a great story to tell people I am having dinner with.” That notion was born of the dream of New York City as a site of madcap adventures and wild characters, the stuff of Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” columns (soon to be, but not yet, adapted as an HBO series) for the New York Observer, the pink-newsprint bible of the chattering class.
That’s the New York City Carroll believed in when she walked into that dressing room. Instead of a funny story, she got shoved up against the dressing room wall and sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, becoming a sort of canary in the coal mine for the rest of America. “It suddenly turned completely dark,” she testified, and don’t we know just how it feels, to be laughing at Donald Trump one moment, only to see everything go dark. Carroll’s new book, Not My Type, recounts her experiences suing Trump for battery and defamation decades later, the latter in response to Trump’s denials after she published accounts of the assault in a magazine article and book in 2019. When Carroll won that first case in 2023, Trump, inevitably, could not restrain himself from badmouthing her, indeed denying that he had ever met her. Carroll sued him again, and in 2024 won a further $83.3 million judgment from the second jury, more than 16 times the compensation the original jury had ordered him to pay her. (Trump is still battling these verdicts. Carroll has said she will use the money to fund a foundation dedicated to women’s and voting rights.)
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Not My Type makes for an unusual rape-trial memoir. At 81, Carroll emphatically does not belong to the generations that organize their identities around past trauma and recovery. Her brand has always been an almost giddy, indomitable insouciance. She describes her 27 years of advice columns as dedicated to assuring women “that the only reason they are on this earth is to enjoy themselves.” Nevertheless, Carroll writes, after the assault she never had sex or a romantic relationship again. In preparation for her first lawsuit against Trump, a trauma specialist interviewed Carroll for three days, concluding that the writer showed “evidence of significant and enduring damage emanating from the assault that allegedly occurred at the hands of Mr. Trump,” and that these symptoms are consistent with the literature on the “aftermath of rape.” When Trump’s own lawyers attempted to undermine this report, they presented as evidence Carroll’s lifelong habit of responding to the question “How are you?” with “Fabulous!”
Fired from her job at Elle in 2020 (as a result, Carroll’s suit claimed, of Trump’s attacks), Carroll now lives in a cabin in upstate New York—not exactly the stuff of metropolitan glamour—but her determination to maintain fabulousness is evident throughout Not My Type. In the face of the old misogynistic practice of asking rape victims what they were wearing before the attack, Carroll records what everybody involved in her lawsuits was wearing all the time—more precisely, who they were wearing, in the parlance of red-carpet interviewers asking stars about their designer fits. Certain items from Carroll’s own wardrobe—particularly a “tightly fitted, russet-brown military jacket with a wide belt and gold buckle” from Bergdorf—verge on becoming characters in their own right. She has a “sensational gold-and-silver Armani blazer” and a cream Oscar de la Renta skirt. If Carroll starts to worry that she is “too concerned about how I look, I remember that Trump’s defense is ‘She’s not my type,’ and how I look is the very center of the case.” What she looks like is typically 20 years younger than her actual age, slim and chic in the quintessential style of the old New York City, the one from just 30 years ago, that Carroll personifies, whatever the rusticity of her current digs. The New York Times even put her on their list of the most stylish people of 2023.
Carroll also lavishes praise on Alina Habba, “Trump’s most beautiful attorney” in both of the cases, and her “green Chanel jacket, more emerald than Granny Smith, with black piping.” This generous and nonpartisan distribution of compliments could be viewed as part of what Carroll calls “the constant aim of my life,” which is “to spread sweetness and light.” Not My Type sometimes reads like a typical frothy celebrity memoir, filled with packing lists, morning routines, and gossip. Carroll namedrops everyone from Molly Jong-Fast to George Conway. The book’s first chapter opens with the transcript of a deposition conducted by Habba in advance of the first trial, in which Habba says, “I hate to ask you this, but—approximately—how many people do you think you’ve slept with?” Carroll’s list, though fairly brief, is spectacular, including the Broadway star Ben Vereen (Carroll’s only one-night stand) and the actor Richard Harris.
It’s a peculiar tone to strike, given the grim nature of Trump’s crimes against Carroll and the thousands of vile insults and death threats his minions showered upon her once she went public—threats that themselves became evidence in the second trial. But there’s a delicious edge buried in Carroll’s bubbly patter. During Trump’s second trial for continuing to defame her, Habba’s incompetence became a media story in its own right, and Not My Type details her various missteps. Carroll closes the book with this bow: “I did what I could. I beat Trump twice. I could not have done it without Alina Habba, Esq. Thank you, Alina!!” Each of those exclamation points is a dagger.
And Carroll did beat Trump, twice, despite the legal odds stacked against women raped by prominent men. This alone makes Not My Type an inspirational read. Though it would be unkind to advocate that every victim adopt Carroll’s dauntless cheer in the face of so much mistreatment, it’s impossible to deny the power her resilience and defiance gave her. Instead of quailing at the sight of Trump’s disdain in the courtroom, she writes, “I’m glad my face is sagging and bagging all over the place. I am seven and a half feet from him at the Plaintiff’s Table, and too bad if he has to look at me in all my fabulous desiccated eighty-year-old glory.” Of course, it helped Carroll to have legal representation from the redoubtable Roberta Kaplan. It helped even more, though, that Trump’s attorneys, like all his henchmen, were second-raters, and that he was literally his own worst enemy, identifying a photo of Carroll as his second wife while giving her book its title by declaring her “not my type.” Trump, like Carroll, is a product of the swashbuckling, glitz-loving, shit-talking New York City of the 1980s and ’90s. Maybe it required another of that breed to take him down a peg.
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