Anyone who pays attention to the news knows about E. Jean Carroll, the eighty-one-year-old advice columnist whom Donald Trump sexually assaulted in a department store dressing room thirty years ago, and who won two massive civil judgments against him in 2023 and 2024. After all, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll a total of more than $88 million for the assault and for defaming her—just before he was elected President for the second time.
Carroll’s memoir of the trial, Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), strikes a different chord than it might have, had the 2024 presidential election gone a different way.
Instead of a triumphant tale of comeuppance for a notorious scofflaw, the memoir—part celebrity gossip, part cathartic recovery tale, part revelatory portrayal of the President of the United States—reads like an allegory in which Carroll’s trauma reflects the experience of an entire nation assaulted by Trump. And so far, despite the multiple legal judgments against him, Trump has yet to pay Carroll a penny.
Carroll shows us Trump’s monstrous cruelty and malignant narcissism in both the dressing room and the courtroom. She provides us a view of the deranged man who snorts and glares, and lies under oath. She describes the shocking and disorienting experience of the assault, with its dizzying transition from a flirtatious, joking encounter—in which Trump suggested she try on a piece of lingerie at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, New York, and she, while laughing, told him to try it on himself—to the sudden and unexpected violence that took place after he trapped her in a dressing room.
During the trial, Joe Tacopina, Trump’s lawyer, “may have accidentally revealed the motive” for the attack when he dwelled on the detail of Carroll laughing at Trump before he assaulted her. Carroll quotes Amanda Marcotte of Salon, who wrote that “humiliation famously triggers [Trump’s] rage.”
Carroll details her difficulty coming to terms with what happened and the manner in which society punishes women who don’t act like “the perfect rape victim,” as she describes it.
Part of Carroll’s triumph is her insistence on remaining herself—a goofy, pleasure-seeking socialite who loves to shop—instead of crumbling into the sorry, self-hating wreck the Trump defense team, and much of the public, demanded she become.
“It’s like they’re suggesting that Ms. Carroll has to show that she has been a broken wreck of a person every single day for the last five years, that she’s had no moments of joy or friendships,” Shawn Crowley, one of her lawyers, says of the Trump team’s defense in court. “In the defense’s view, any time Ms. Carroll went to a party with friends, or celebrated a victory in her lawsuit against him, or presented a brave face to the public, she was somehow showing that his defamatory statements caused her no harm and this case is just some big conspiracy against him.”
Likely, there will be scolds on both the MAGA right and the progressive left who will find plenty of reasons to dismiss Carroll in her memoir’s detailed descriptions of outfits, worries about her appearance, and tangents about her love affairs, celebrity friends, and glamorous life. But as I read the book, I found myself cheering for her, not in spite of those sections, but because of what they demonstrated: her irrepressible determination to remain true to herself.
“We spark the fighting spirits in old ladies everywhere,” Carroll declared after winning the second judgment against Trump, for $83 million.
Hooray for the old lady who took on Trump and won! She should be a hero to all of us who are struggling to figure out how to mount an effective resistance against the hideous, maniacal Trump cult. By remaining honest and maintaining her own capacity for laughter, love, and joy, Carroll overcame the demonic black hole that tried to silence and snuff her out. Long may her light shine.
In the book, Carroll describes what she ate, how she prepared for trial, and what the entire cast of characters involved in the trial looked like as they danced across the courtroom stage. She’s an entertaining writer who acknowledges without judgment the voyeuristic interest many readers will undoubtedly bring to her book. She understands Trump’s star power as a pop-culture phenomenon, and her book helps explain how we got to our current desperate political moment.
The preparations for trial involved hair and makeup sessions designed to give the jury an idea of what she looked like when Trump attacked her in 1996. It wasn’t mere frivolity, of course, that prompted Carroll and her lawyers to worry about her appearance during trial. As a rape survivor, Carroll’s attractiveness and sexuality were objects of intense scrutiny. A big part of Trump’s defense was his assertion, captured in the title of the book, that she was “not my type,” or as his supporters more bluntly put it in their hate messages to Carroll, that she was “too ugly to rape.”
Carroll suffered deep trauma from the assault, never had sex again, and remained in a state of high anxiety for years, which wasn’t helped by the thousands of grotesque threats of rape and murder she received from Trump’s rabid fan base. But she persevered.
Carroll’s story strikes a blow against a culture that still treats women as if expressing their sexuality means they deserve to be violently attacked. And it is heartening to see her reject the avalanche of attacks and then survive and thrive in spite of all that hate.
In a broader sense, Carroll’s relationship with Trump mirrors our country’s experience. When Trump first ran for President in the 2016 Republican primary, many people found him funny and even refreshing. At a Trump campaign event, I remember sitting next to an anti-corporate activist who worked for Ralph Nader and who laughed when Trump ad-libbed an impersonation of a hapless Democrat embracing damaging global trade deals.
It’s easy to forget now how preposterous Trump seemed as a candidate, and how much of what he said appealed to people’s cynicism about the pretentiousness of the regular political establishment. Especially to swing voters in the industrial and rural Midwest, he seemed like a representative of the little guy taking on the pompous elites.
Like Carroll, a lot of those voters thought they were in on the joke. Like Carroll, they had a flirtation with a colorful reality TV star who upended politics by appealing to Americans’ sense of irreverence, coming to us through our silly, superficial, celebrity-obsessed culture. In a fundamental way, many Americans, like Carroll, were naive about the brutal, nihilistic violence just beneath the surface of Trump’s flashy exterior.
A lot of people are still in shock about how bad Trump turned out to be when he took power. We’re still reeling from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. We’re still incredulous at masked federal agents snatching people off the streets and disappearing them without due process; at the federal government attacking voting rights, scientific research, and reliable economic data, and dismantling long-standing democratic institutions. We’re having trouble getting a grasp on what to do as our country descends into fascism.
If Carroll could find her balance and summon the courage to stand up to this lawless megalomaniac and win, then there is hope for the rest of us, too.