E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her and won two multimillion dollar judgments against him, is publishing a behind-the-scenes account of her legal entanglements with the president.
Carroll’s new book, “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President,” is due out on Tuesday.
The book, which Carroll spoke about in an interview with New York magazine, is described by her publisher as a “hilarious, hopeful, revelatory behind-the-scenes account” that “puts you in a better seat than the jury box.”
Carroll sold the book in March 2024, and she and her publisher went to unusual lengths to keep it secret. Booksellers were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and Carroll and her editor sometimes communicated over Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, according to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, the executive editor at St. Martin’s.
Carroll’s account of the trial is delivered in her idiosyncratic, buoyant style. The memoir opens with a Trump attorney asking her to list all of the people she’s ever slept with (“As I am excessively fond of my lovers, my answers to her question give me several minutes of happiness,” she writes), and includes courtroom transcripts that are peppered with her colorful commentary. She describes being cross-examined about why she didn’t scream during the assault — she didn’t want to make a scene, she explained — and the intense moment when she and Trump locked eyes in the courtroom.
In a phone interview on Friday, Carroll said she decided to write about the trial because, as a reporter, she couldn’t resist the chance to narrate a surreal experience and major story.
“I found myself, an old journalist, in the middle of a high comedy surrounded with characters that not even Jonathan Swift himself could have created,” she said, evoking the famous satirist. “I just could not help myself.”
While there are no bombshell revelations or new accusations in the book, St. Martin’s kept it quiet to ensure the book was available to readers soon after it was announced, said Dyssegaard.
“We all watched the news, we all saw the headlines, but getting behind the scenes is really different,” Dyssegaard said. “Her ability to work with the transcripts and weave everything around that makes it a really unusual book.”
Reached for comment about Carroll’s book and the outcome of the cases, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team dismissed her lawsuits as a politically motivated hoax, and said the American people “demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax, which will continue to be appealed.”
In her 2019 memoir, “What Do We Need Men For?,” Carroll described how, after what began as a friendly encounter, Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996.
In response to her claims, Trump called her a liar and said he had never met her, and dismissed her story as outlandish, noting, “She’s not my type,” a line Carroll repurposed for her new book’s title.
As attacks from Trump and his supporters continued, Carroll took her claims to court. In 2019, she sued Trump for defamation, and in 2022, she brought a second suit against him, accusing him of rape and additional defamation when he posted on social media that her account was a hoax.
Juries in both cases handed Carroll a resounding victory. In May 2023, a Manhattan jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse, though not rape, and awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. On Friday, an appellate court in New York rejected Trump’s latest request to rehear the case.
In 2024, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million in damages to her in a separate defamation case. “Like Peter Pan I cannot say that I have ever come down from flying around the courtroom ceiling,” Carroll writes in “Not My Type” of the moment when the decision was announced.
Trump’s appeal of that verdict is ongoing, and Carroll has not yet received any of the money that juries awarded her; some of the funds are being held in a court-controlled trust. She has said she plans to donate them to causes that Trump “hates.”
In the wake of her accusations and the widely covered trials, Carroll’s life was upended. As online threats against her mounted, she feared for her safety: She got a 20-gauge shotgun and installed a high-tech security system around her home, a secluded cabin in upstate New York, she said.
Carroll said that despite the threats, she wasn’t worried that her new book will draw a fresh round of attacks and criticism — she’s already made her case in court.
“I had nothing to lose,” she said.
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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