I am a long-time fan of E. Jean Carroll and it began with her "Ask E. Jean" column in Elle. Back then I subscribed to all of the big fashion magazines—Vogue, Elle, Mademoiselle, Glamour, W, etc.—and it was the one thing that kept me resubscribing to Elle. Her advice was funny and to the point, and she wasn't afraid to be sharp when necessary.
Away from the fashion magazine pages, she was the first female gozno journalist and the first woman to write for Playboy. She was a fixture in New York nightlife in the late 1990s and remembered it this way:
One of the most legendary was the bar and restaurant Elaine's, frequented by a local who's who of writers, actors and artists.
"I lived in Elaine's,'' Carroll said. "I knew everybody there. I was sitting at the writer's table and that was heaven on Earth. ... You could go in at any time and there was always a table of writers, and you would just sit down. Sometimes detectives would join us. Sometimes prizefighters. But there was always a writers table, and it was usually on a Thursday night.''
Everyone who was anyone in the world of publishing would pass through, she says, including Jackie Kennedy, who was an editor, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese. "Sometimes the evenings would be so hot with celebrities, it was unbelievable.''
Carroll was also on TV a lot, although I wasn't home to watch her morning show appearances. And every month there was another Elle column in the mail. She was eccentric and different and alive, definitely not a cookie cutter woman.
I was shocked when I learned that TFG had sexually assaulted her—not so much that he had, because he's a disgusting pig, but that she had kept it quiet for so long.
Carroll's writing style and voice has informed her recounting of Trump's alleged sexual assault. And some have questioned the way she's described a traumatic event, as well as her refusal to call what she says happened rape.
"Every woman gets to choose her word,'' Carroll said in an interview on the New York Times' The Daily podcast. "Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. ... I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought. That's the thing.''
TFG never saw any of this coming, because our society doesn't give any worth to older women. On Monday Jessica Bennet wrote about Carroll's victory for the NYT Opinion section (gift link so you can read the whole thing):
What makes what Ms. Carroll did so remarkable is that she was, of course, worth less in the eyes of the world now than she was in her prime. She wasn't retired — "Never," she told me — but she certainly wasn't trekking across the jungle in search of primitive man, and the hundreds of letters to her advice column each week asking her how to find a good man had tapered to a trickle. The chutzpah required, after all of that, and in the face of both her biological reality and a culture that most certainly doesn't look kindly on women her age, to still insist she was worth something … it was ballsy enough to be almost Trumpian. Until, of course, you appreciate that a fight over the financial value of a reputation at age 80 is really less about your earnings and more about your dignity.
Dignity. Something TFG doesn't have and will never understand, and because of that he never saw round 2 coming to a head last week with the $83 million dollar award. Carroll was on Rachel Maddow's show Monday and she had this to say about sitting in court with TFG and watching him:
"He was a phantom. It was the people around him who were giving him power. He himself was nothing. It was an astonishing discovery for me. He's nothing. We don't need to be afraid of him. He can be knocked down."
It's pretty astounding that this 80 year old woman (and her team of excellent lawyers) was the first person to lay a punch on him back in May with the first award. But he came back because he doesn't understand how important dignity is to Carroll, and indeed to many older women, and now we'll see if that's the knockout punch for this fight. So far it's holding. Katy's got it from here.
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