NOT MY TYPE: One Woman vs. a President, by E. Jean Carroll
We already know that E. Jean Carroll looked smashing when she went to court versus Donald J. Trump. But her irrepressible voice was, necessarily, repressed.
For 27 years, with countless exclamation points and emphatic italics, Carroll wrote the “Ask E. Jean” column for Elle magazine, focusing on the perils of modern dating. Advice columns, a quaint holdover from the heyday of print you’d think ChatGPT would make redundant, remain curiously ubiquitous.
Yet even in a crowded field, this adrenalized agony aunt, currently on Substack, stands out, with her giddy feminism (her tuxedo cat is named Vagina T. Fireball); literary references (the Great Pyrenees dog: Miss Havisham); and runaway retro expressions like “egads!” and “twitpiffle.”
Testifying in depositions and two trials, however, Carroll was instructed by her lawyers to keep her answers short. “Very, very short,” she writes in “Not My Type,” a delightful full-gallop account of the experience, and sequel of sorts to “What Do We Need Men For?” (2019), in which she first accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. “I receive the impression that saying nothing at all would be best,” she adds.
Now she is saying pretty much everything, including a few evidentiary morsels not introduced at trial. Like that Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s friend, had heard and gossiped about what had happened. And a 1987 “Spy 100” issue listed Bergdorf dressing rooms in an article about places for “lunchtime adultery.” The man the magazine called a “short-fingered vulgarian” was among those on the cover.
Trump has plenty of his own insults at hand, of course. Indeed the title “Not My Type” is taken from one about why he never would have advanced on the unconsenting Carroll: “No. 1, she’s not my type.” (He did, however, mistake her in an old photo for one of his exes, Marla Maples.) “No. 2, it never happened,” he added. “It never happened, OK?”
Last Friday, an appeals court rejected his bid for a redo.
Carroll may not have yet received the combined $88.3 million awarded to her in damages — over $100 million with compounded interest — which she vows here to donate to various causes the president hates.
But with transcript excerpts, morning routines and packing lists (à la the canonical one by the author she calls Saint Joan Didion), she has produced a trial scrapbook that is also a memoir of love and friendship, a photo party, a movie set and — though sprinkled with social media posts — a mash note to Ye Olde New Journalism. She is a Tom Wolfette armored in a “navy-blue Dior-inspired Zara suit” and Revlon’s Toast of New York lipstick, punctuating her observations with a “whoooooooosh!” and a “Swaaaaaaaaaaaaak!”
She notes the Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina’s schmancy tailoring and muscular physique — “leaning a left buttock — as pumped as a tetherball — against the jury box.” She compares the defendant variously to “a finely aged Troy Donahue,” “an elderly gigolo” and, as the wind ruffles his famous coif, Barbara Stanwyck.
A mock jury summoned to prepare her for the trial perceived Carroll as a member of the elite. “How anyone can think a hick raised in sticks so deep the hick is still pulling twigs out of her hair 80 years later is ‘elite,’ is beyond me,” she writes.
Maybe because she savors words like “velutinous” (her attorney warned her against more than three syllables). And because she insists one government chamber resembles a Busby Berkeley ballroom, and she can handily compare the Benadryl recommended by friends concerned about her insomnia to the orange juice laced with whiskey pressed upon Gussie Fink-Nottle in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Right Ho, Jeeves.”
Raised in a redbrick schoolhouse in Fort Wayne, Ind., Carroll — former sorority girl, cheerleader, beauty pageant survivor — began pitching story ideas to magazines when she was 12. Esquire accepted her first article when she was 37. “Can you imagine the relentless, insane, glorious, hot, blistering beat-yourself-up, plow-ahead, never-say-die enthusiasm that drives a woman to go on and on and on through a blizzard of blunt editors’ numbing ‘Nos’ for 25 years?” she marvels. (Honey, I fold after 25 seconds.)
Carroll took Fran Lebowitz camping for Outside, became Playboy’s first female contributing editor and chewed acid with Hunter S. Thompson for an appropriately gonzo biography, wherein she assumed the alter ego of a virginal ornithologist named Miss Laetitia Snap, who was interested in Thompson’s peacock collection.
This adventuresome, anything-goes spirit, Carroll writes, also led her to accept Trump’s suggestion that they visit the lingerie floor of Bergdorf’s, a store with dressing rooms so capacious that Jackie Kennedy used them to pore over manuscripts after lunch when she was an editor at Doubleday.
“Hey, you’re that advice lady,” she remembers Trump saying when they ran into each other in the lobby.
“Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon.”
And before long, she testified, after stroking a fur hat Dr. Evil-style and suggesting some personal shopping, he had pulled down her tights and was “rummaging” and worse in her private parts.
Carroll had attended a Pi Beta Phi pledge dance on the arm of the future basketball star Tom Van Arsdale — “O! I simply adored Tom Van Arsdale!”— and married twice. Among her lovers were the actors Ben Vereen and Richard Harris and the gadabout journalist Anthony Haden-Guest. But after Trump’s attack, she writes, she stopped having sex. “It’s like when shopkeepers pull down the metal grate to secure the store,” she told a trauma specialist. “Little Jeanie who was so boy crazy her whole life just shut it down.”
If only Bergdorf’s had pulled down that grate. But then this book would not exist, topping off Carroll’s whipped-cream oeuvre like a slightly bruised but still buoyant maraschino cherry.
NOT MY TYPE: One Woman vs. a President | By E. Jean Carroll | St. Martin’s | 368 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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