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Two Women Who Heard E. Jean Carroll’s Account of Being Attacked by Trump Go Public Why E. Jean Carroll, ‘the Anti-Victim,’ Spoke Up About Trump
(about 7 hours later)
Two women in whom E. Jean Carroll confided about having allegedly been sexually attacked by Donald Trump in the 1990s spoke publicly about it for the first time in an interview excerpted on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” describing the conflicting advice they gave their friend at the time. E. Jean Carroll tore through the doors of the Fifth Avenue entrance of Bergdorf Goodman, her heart racing.
On Wednesday, Megan Twohey, a Times reporter, interviewed Ms. Carroll and the two women, Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach, who had not been publicly identified until now. It was the first time since the alleged assault that the women had discussed it together. Ms. Carroll, a journalist and the host of the “Ask E. Jean” television show at the time, had taped a segment that day in 1996 at a studio in Fort Lee, N.J. When it ended around 5 p.m., she decided to come into Manhattan to shop at her favorite store.
In a forthcoming book titled “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” an excerpt from which was published on New York magazine’s website, Ms. Carroll, an advice columnist, accuses Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. From the sidewalk, she phoned Lisa Birnbach, a friend and author of “The Official Preppy Handbook.” Ms. Carroll was laughing at first as she described an encounter she said she had just had in a Bergdorf dressing room with Donald J. Trump that began as cheeky banter. But what she was saying didn’t strike Ms. Birnbach as funny. “I remember her being very overwrought,” Ms. Birnbach said in an interview. “I remember her repeatedly saying, ‘He pulled down my tights, he pulled down my tights.’” When Ms. Carroll finished her account, Ms. Birnbach said, “‘I think he raped you.’”
President Trump has forcefully denied the accusation, saying Ms. Carroll was “lying,” that he didn’t know her and that he wouldn’t have assaulted her because “she’s not my type.” “Let’s go to the police,” she recalled telling Ms. Carroll. But Ms. Carroll refused. A day or two later, she described the episode to another friend, Carol Martin, a TV host at the same network. She advised Ms. Carroll to stay silent.
Portions of the interview were played Thursday on “The Daily,” and a fuller article about Ms. Carroll by Ms. Twohey, Jessica Bennett and Alexandra Alter will follow later in the day. For now, here are the main takeaways from the interview: [Listen to E. Jean Carroll and her confidantes discuss the allegations on “The Daily.”]
• The two women in whom Ms. Carroll confided were well-known figures in the ’90s world of New York media. Ms. Martin was a news anchor on WCBS-TV in New York from 1975 to 1995. Ms. Birnbach is a writer best known for “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a best seller released in 1981. She has occasionally written for The Times. “These traumas stay with you,” Ms. Martin said. “I didn’t know what to do except listen.”
Both knew or had met Mr. Trump during that period: Ms. Birnbach had recently interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., while Ms. Martin had met him at her news station and had a friend who briefly dated him. The three women didn’t speak about the incident again until Ms Carroll began preparing for her forthcoming book, they said. It became public last week when Ms. Carroll, in a New York magazine excerpt from the book, accused the president of sexually assaulting her years ago. It was the most serious of multiple allegations women have made against him, all of which he has denied.
• When Ms. Carroll told the two women about the alleged attack, they had very different reactions: Ms. Birnbach said she told Ms. Carroll to call the police, while Ms. Martin told Ms. Carroll not to talk about it because Mr. Trump was too powerful. Ultimately, Ms. Carroll, thinking she was partially to blame for the encounter, remained silent about it for decades. Ms. Birnbach and Ms. Martin, who haven’t previously spoken publicly about Ms. Carroll’s account, say they are doing so now to bolster their friend, especially since she has been attacked in recent days by skeptics and some supporters of Mr. Trump.
“I said: Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t tell anybody this,” Ms. Martin said. “I saw some horrible things that people were posting on social media,” Ms. Birnbach said. “I believe E. Jean in this episode that she recounted to me in 1996. Yes. Without hesitation. She’s not a fabulist.” She added, “She doesn’t make things up.”
• Ms. Carroll eventually stopped believing that what happened to her was her fault, but she does not want to consider herself a victim and does not describe the incident as a rape. Mr. Trump has said that Ms. Carroll was “totally lying,” that he didn’t know her and that “she’s not my type.”
“Every woman gets to choose her word,” she said. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is fight. My word is not the victim word.” In media interviews in recent days, Ms. Carroll, who once wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” has been confident. Asked on MSNBC why she made her accusation in a book, she replied: “What? A woman is not allowed to take a pen and put it to a piece of paper?” (“That didn’t go over very well,” she said in an interview later.) On CNN, she explained why she preferred the word “fight” to “rape”: “I think most people think rape is sexy. Think of the fantasies.” (She explained later that she was referring to romance novels that depict men ravishing women. “This was not thrilling, this was a fight,” she said. “A fight where I’m stamping on his feet and I think I’m banging him on the head with my purse.”)
“I have not been raped,” she continued. “Something has not been done to me. I fought.” Those public appearances are in keeping with how friends describe her: the girlfriend who would ride a Yugoslav freighter to Tangier; the plucky author of a popular column who dispensed advice on every aspect of her devoted readers’ lives, from sex to careers, but kept her own struggles private. She is a former Miss Cheerleader USA turned journalist, whose gonzo-style approach led The New York Times in 1981 to call her “feminism’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson.”
• Ms. Carroll said she originally intended to write a book about touring the country and cheekily asking women if they’d be better off without men. Then accusations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein ignited the #MeToo movement, and she realized she needed to reckon with her own experiences. The book morphed to include an account of her own encounters with men, including Mr. Trump. “The thing with E. Jean is she doesn’t adhere to a script,” said Marilyn Johnson, an author and longtime friend. “She’s a total original. “
• Ms. Carroll said she had no expectation that telling her story would have an impact. At 75 years old, she has come not to expect such stories to come to anything. Ms. Carroll, now 75, grew up Betty Jean Carroll outside Huntertown, Ind., though her family and oldest friends call her Jeanie. She spent more than a decade living on a ranch in Montana, changed her name to Elizabeth Jean, then shortened it in her first Esquire byline to “E. Jean.” She now lives in upstate New York, on what she calls “an island” of secluded forest near the Appalachian Trail. Her home, which she shares with a cat named Vagina T. Fireball, is a small cottage painted with black and white stripes, with polka dots on the chimney. “It’s like part refuge, part fortress, part headquarters,” said Lisa Chase, her editor at Outside magazine and later at Elle, where Ms. Carroll has written the “Ask E. Jean” column for more than 20 years. “If you go there, look in the oven. I think she’s got a lot of books in there.”
Listen to the episode here. Ms. Carroll often wears workwear-style jumpsuits, of which she has more than a dozen in varying shades. “Try to get this unzipped,” she said to a reporter, standing up in a restaurant. “Go ahead! Good luck.” She is an archer who keeps five arrows, along with a bow and a quiver, above her fireplace. “I’m a crack shot,” she said.
When she wanted to profile Hunter S. Thompson, she showed up at his house in Colorado and all but moved in. She later wrote that the two had become intimately involved, and had done acid together. For Esquire, she profiled Dan Rather and Lyle Lovett (she asked him his penis size), and she persuaded the humor writer Fran Lebowitz to go camping with her for an article in Outside. For Playboy, she trekked across Papua New Guinea for a story “in search of primitive man.” In 1995, when Ms. Carroll found a lump in her breast, she brought a film crew to her surgery — and aired it on her television show.
“She was incapable of being uninteresting, or writing a boring sentence,” said Bill Tonelli, her editor at Esquire. “She was fearless.”
She co-founded a dating website in 2002 called Greatboyfriends.com — where women could recommend their exes — and later, a matchmaking service called Tawkify. (Greatboyfriends sold to The Knot in 2005 for $600,000.) But, she revealed in the New York Magazine excerpt, she has not had sex since the encounter with Mr. Trump that day in the dressing room.
“I just was not lucky enough to meet someone,” she said in an interview. “The desire for desire was over.”
In her book, “What Do We Need Men For?,” which comes out Tuesday, she describes“hideous men” in her life. In addition to Mr. Trump, the list includes the former CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, who she said groped her in a hotel elevator in when she interviewed him for a 1997 Esquire story; a childhood camp friend who sexually assaulted her as a young girl; and her second husband, the television personality John Johnson, whom she described as physically abusive.
Mr. Moonves has denied Ms. Carroll’s account of his groping. Reached by phone, Mr. Johnson declined to comment.
Confidantes provided some corroboration of Ms. Carroll’s claims. Nancy Hass, a writer for The Times’s T Magazine, said that in the late 1990s, Ms. Carroll mentioned having been groped by Mr. Moonves, but didn’t go into detail. “E. Jean is the anti-victim,” Ms. Hass said in an interview. “She can’t bear pity.”
Another friend, a former news producer named C. C. Dyer, said in an interview that she was with Ms. Carroll one morning and saw red marks on her neck, a ripped nightgown and bloodshot eyes after what Ms. Carroll said was an altercation with Mr. Johnson, an incident described in the book. Ms. Dyer said she told her husband at the time, Geraldo Rivera, about it. (A Fox News spokeswoman said Mr. Rivera was traveling and not available for an interview.)
Ms. Dyer was among more than a dozen former colleagues, family members and friends interviewed by The Times who attested to Ms. Carroll’s credibility.
“It’s inconceivable to me that she would make up a story like this,” said Stephen Byers, a former editor at National Geographic and her first husband, referring to the Trump allegation. He and Ms. Carroll were married for more than a decade. “She’s a very honorable woman.”
Still, there are unresolved questions about Ms. Carroll’s accusations, including the absence of any witnesses or, apparently, staff in the lingerie department at Bergdorf’s, and the lack of physical evidence. She has acknowledged that her response afterward — when she called her friend, laughing — may appear odd, but she attributes it to being in shock. In her book, she was hazy about whether the incident had taken place in 1995 or 1996; after recent conversations with Ms. Birnbach, they believe that it was most likely in 1996. And despite the president’s growing political profile, for years Ms. Carroll never raised the subject of her encounter with Mr. Trump.
Why speak up only now? If not when it happened, why not in 2016, when more than 10 other women came forward accusing Mr. Trump of sexual improprieties? Or when the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about assaulting women, was revealed?
Cande Carroll, 71, said that she, E. Jean, and their two other siblings — Tommy and Barbara — were in Indiana at their dying mother’s bedside the day the tape was disclosed. “We were all horrified,” the younger Ms. Carroll said. Her sister, though, said nothing about a personal story.
E. Jean Carroll said the “Access Hollywood” tape and the allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Trump did not compel her to speak about her own experience with him. If anything, said Ms. Carroll, who describes herself as a “gun-owning Democrat,” she figured the accusations made Mr. Trump appear strong in the eyes of his supporters. “I suspected it was helping,” she said.
On election night in 2016, Ms. Carroll was at Ms. Birnbach’s home watching the results. Ms. Carroll thought there was a moment when she and Ms. Birnbach shared a knowing look about Mr. Trump, but Ms. Birnbach did not recall it. In fact, she said, by that point she had forgotten what Ms. Carroll had told her.
As Ms. Carroll described it, the original idea for her book had nothing to do with Donald Trump. Rather, after years of listening to her readers’ concerns — most of them related to men — she had decided to take her dog on a trip around America and ask women the question: Do we really need men? The plan was to visit towns named after women, such as Cynthiana, Ind. — “it sounds like poetry!” she said — to eat in restaurants named for women, read books by women and listen to women artists in the car.
“I actually thought this was going to be a ‘Travels with Charley,’” Ms. Carroll said in an interview.
But then #MeToo happened. The news of allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke as she was driving through Pennsylvania in the fall of 2017. “I just kept pulling over to see the story,” she said. “And I couldn’t help but think of men in my own life.”
She also thought of the women she had advised over the years to buck up, to speak up, to go to the police or “move everything out when he’s at work.” “I felt like a fraud,” she said, because she had taken no such action herself. By the time she submitted her book proposal, in May 2018, she’d rethought it as part memoir, with the Trump allegation included. St. Martin’s Press paid a modest sum.
Ms. Carroll invited Ms. Birnbach and Ms. Martin to lunch last year and showed them the chapter depicting the encounter with Mr. Trump and the friends’ discussions about it. (Their names do not appear in the book.) In it, she wrote that she and Mr. Trump had recognized each other at Bergdorf’s, talked playfully about what gift he might buy for a woman, and ended up in the lingerie department, challenging each other to try on a lilac bodysuit. She remembered thinking it would make a great story.
But in the dressing room, with no one nearby, Ms. Carroll said Mr. Trump pushed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and put his penis inside her. “It was violent, I fought, but didn’t think of it as …” she trailed off, never saying “rape.” “I have a hard time even saying that word,” she said.
She said she blamed herself for going into the dressing room with him. “What an idiot,” she said. “You don’t combine lingerie and going in a closed room.”
Sitting in Ms. Birnbach’s living room this week, the three reflected on the secret’s finally being out in the open.
As prominent journalists in New York in the 1990s, all three had at one point operated in overlapping circles with Mr. Trump, the real estate heir and tabloid news fixture with a messy personal life.
Ms. Carroll and Ms. Martin both had shows on America’s Talking, the cable channel run by Roger Ailes, and Ms. Martin said she had a brief exchange with Mr. Trump when he came in for an interview. She also had a friend who briefly dated him. Ms. Birnbach had interviewed Mr. Trump for an article about Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, in the months before she received that phone call from Ms. Carroll. And Ms. Carroll and her husband at the time had been photographed with Mr. Trump and his then-wife, Ivana Trump, at an NBC party in the late 1980s.
Ms. Carroll seems undaunted by the criticism and doubt that her accusations have unleashed. After taping an interview with CNN on Monday, Ms. Carroll went to a party in Brooklyn, where friends and former editors had gathered to toast her with a bottle of Chartreuse (her favorite) and a cake that read BRAVE. How was she? They wanted to know. Was she checking Twitter? Was she scared?
“I’m having a ball,” she replied.
She handed over a small box to the hostess — a gift to thank her for organizing the party. It was from Bergdorf’s.