E. Jean Carroll

The advice columnist who outlasted the presidents

For a quarter-century, E. Jean Carroll answered strangers’ questions about other people. “Ask E. Jean,” her advice column in the US edition of Elle, ran from 1993 to 2019 — one of the longest-running advice columns in American magazine history. (Le Monde). No standard profile leads with the half-century of writing. She was the first woman to write for Playboy, contributed to Esquire, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic, and wrote a biography of Hunter S. Thompson. They start with the lawsuit instead. But the writer’s career is the fact that explains everything else: at 75, Carroll already knew exactly how to hold an audience — and how to keep a record. When she wrote her 2025 book Not My Type: One Woman vs a President, she simply reproduced the trial transcripts and let her own sharp tongue do the rest (Le Monde).

In June 2019, while Trump was serving his first term, Carroll went public with the allegation that he had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in 1996 — an account contained in her memoir What Do We Need Men For? The price, she said, was immediate: thousands of hate messages, insults, and threats (Le Monde). AFP, in 2026, called her “the only person to successfully sue US President Donald Trump for sexual assault” — a claim no other accuser has matched (AFP).

The legal architecture: two cases, two juries, two verdicts

The litigation came in two parts. In May 2023, a New York jury — hearing the case brought under a special window New York granted sexual-abuse survivors — found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. The jury expressly did not find Trump liable for “rape”: at the time, New York defined “sexual abuse” as sexual contact by forcible compulsion, while “rape” required vaginal penetration by a penis (the definition has since been broadened) (Reason). Then, in January 2024, a second jury — hearing the defamation case Carroll had filed in 2019 over Trump’s denials — awarded her $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages (Le Monde).

Trump’s appeals have all failed. The 2nd Circuit affirmed the $83.3 million award in September, calling it reasonable “in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case”: “the now-indisputable fact that a jury found in (the other case) that Trump sexually abused Carroll in 1996” precluded relitigation. “The record in this case supports the district court’s determination that the ‘degree of reprehensibility’ of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented,” the court wrote, noting Trump’s repeated comments had produced “a multitude of death threats and other threats of physical injury.” Trump asked the Supreme Court to throw the award out on July 28, 2026, arguing that allowing it to stand would leave presidents “fearful of civil liability” for official acts, citing the Court’s 2024 presidential-immunity ruling (USA Today).

The first case had already ended. In late June 2026 the Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s appeal; the $5.6 million — damages plus interest, deposited by Trump and held for years — was released to Carroll in July. Trump then tried to claw it back with a court injunction, asking the justices to reconsider; they refused again, and on September 30, 2026, lawyers for both sides signed an agreement that the injunction was moot. The money was hers (AFP). Along the way there had been a final scare: in late May 2026, amid reports that a federal prosecutor in Illinois had opened a criminal case against her, Carroll said she prepared for an arrest. The US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Boutros, publicly denied any investigation (AFP). She has said the $83.3 million, when it arrives, will go “to all the causes Trump hates: women’s and minority rights, environmentalism, and so on” (Le Monde).

The ABC settlement

Carroll’s case reached one other institution with a checkbook. On March 10, 2024, George Stephanopoulos interviewed Representative Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week and repeatedly — twelve times, per Trump’s complaint — asserted that Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had not: the jury had found him liable for “sexual abuse,” a legally distinct finding under New York law at the time. Stephanopoulos knew the distinction — five weeks earlier, on the same program, he had accurately said juries found Trump “liable for sexual assault and defamation.” (Reason).

Trump sued ABC News and Stephanopoulos for defamation in the Southern District of Florida. In December 2024 ABC settled: a $15 million contribution to Trump’s presidential library, plus $1 million of Trump’s legal fees, and an editor’s note appended to the March 10 story — “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump.” The case had genuine legal risk on both sides: ABC argued that when Trump sued Carroll for defamation, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan had ruled her statements “substantially true” because the jury’s sexual-abuse finding implicitly determined that Trump forcibly penetrated her digitally — “rape” as the term is commonly used. But Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected ABC’s motion to dismiss, holding that a reasonable jury could interpret Stephanopoulos’s statements as defamatory. Faced with discovery against a sitting president, ABC paid (Reason).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not call the 2023 verdict a “rape” finding — the jury found sexual abuse and defamation, expressly not rape under the then-applicable New York definition, and this profile keeps that distinction. It does not assert Carroll’s exact birth date, birthplace, or pageant history, which were not verified in fully read sources. It does not claim the $83.3 million has been paid — as of this writing Trump is still contesting it through the Supreme Court. It does not assert the NYT-bestseller ranking of Not My Type or the existence of the 2025 docuseries, which appeared only in snippets. It does not repeat Trump’s denials as fact, and it does not claim any other accuser has won a comparable civil case.