E Jean Carroll: The pioneering advice columnist, author and TV talkshow host who took on Donald Trump
E Jean Carroll has been a trailblazing figure of New York’s journalism, entertainment and literary scenes for decades.
Born in Detroit and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the one-time Miss Indiana University beauty queen began pitching her ideas to magazines at the age of 12.
After graduating from college, she got her breakthrough by landing her first published article in Esquire, a “witty literary quiz she concocted” about Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald.
From there, writing assignments at Rolling Stone and Playboy began to “trickle in”, she told Indianapolis Monthly in 1996.
While living in Montana with her first husband Steve Byers and their dog, she came to New York City in 1983 to interview Fran Leibowitz for a cover article in Outside magazine.
Entranced by the bright lights of Manhattan, Ms Carroll decided to leave her husband and move there on the spot. “Of course, I went back for my dog,” she told Indianapolis Monthly.
Ms Carroll quickly established herself as one of the city’s top magazine journalists, writing “Gonzo-style” first-person articles for Playboy and New York.
The New York Times called her “feminism’s answer to Hunter S Thompson”.
She was hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live, earning an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program in 1987.
In the 1990s, she went on to host her own cable television talkshow Ask E. Jean .
While her career was taking off, Ms Carroll became a fixture in the glitzy New York social scene.
She was a regular at Elaine’s, a legendary Upper East Side restaurant frequented by a who’s who of celebrities.
According to a profile in USA Today, Ms Carroll mingled with literary heavyweights Normal Mailer and Gay Talese. Jackie Kennedy, by then a book editor at Viking Press, would stop by.
She married former TV anchorman John Johnson, later divorcing in 1990.
Ms Carroll, whose civil rape and defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump goes to trial on 25 April, is probably best known for her advice column Ask E Jean, which ran in Elle from 1993 to 2019.
Over hundreds of columns, Ms Carroll helped women navigate the “choppy waters” of their work, social and sex lives. A consistent theme was that women should “never” structure their lives around men.
‘I blame Donald Trump’
In 2019, Ms Carroll released her memoir What Do We Need Men For?, which drew on work that had endeared her to Elle readers for nearly 40 years.
The book contained a list of the “hideous men” she had encountered, and a bombshell allegation: that she had been raped by the then president of the United States 30 years earlier.
In What Do We Need Men For?, she detailed for the first time an encounter she says she had with Mr Trump at the 5th Avenue Department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
A random encounter between the two, who she said were casual acquaintances, led to Mr Trump asking her for help on selecting a gift for “a girl”.
After the pair shopped for a while, he allegedly pushed her into a dressing room, and raped her, according to the book and court documents.
The alleged rape by Mr Trump and his crass denials from the presidential podium have placed an intense spotlight ever since on the 79-year-old.
She believed that fallout from the accusation led Elle to fire her in December 2019. “Because Trump ridiculed my reputation, laughed at my looks, & dragged me through the mud,” she tweeted at the time.
“I don't blame Elle. It was the great honor of my life writing ‘Ask E. Jean.’ I blame Donald Trump.”
The fashion magazine has maintained that the early termination of her contract had nothing to do with the allegations.
The ‘last hideous man’
A 2019 investigation by the New York Times found corroborating evidence to support Ms Carroll’s claims.
She had discussed the traumatic experience with several friends at the time. She also accused Les Moonves, the disgraced former chairman and CEO of CBS, of sexual assault.
In an essay for New York magazine, she revealed that she never had sex again after her encounter with Mr Trump, her “last hideous man”.
Months after the allegations were made public, she filed a civil lawsuit against the president for rape and defamation.
Mr Trump has sought to stall the lawsuit at every turn, even enlisting the help the Justice Department to defend him in the case while in the Oval Office.
When he claimed he had never met her, she produced a picture of them together with Ivana Trump and her then-husband John Johnson at an NBC party in 1987.
Ms Carroll filed a second lawsuit against Mr Trump under a New York law that allows sexual assault survivors a chance to bring civil suits after the statute of limitations has expired on alleged offences.
The new lawsuit accuses him of battery and defamation, based on his name-calling and insults, and is the basis of the 25 April trial.
In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, Ms Carroll interviewed five women who had accused Mr Trump of sexual assault for the Atlantic.
After nearly four years of delays, depositions, hearings, a jury will soon decide whether the sexual assault can be proven 30 years on.
Now living alone in a cabin in upstate New York, Ms Carroll has said she plans to attend every day of the trial.
