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Book Review|In ‘Not My Type,’ E. Jean Carroll Gets the Last Gab About the Trump Trials
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/books/review/not-my-type-e-jean-carroll.html
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Nonfiction
Her lawyers urged that she keep her testimony short. With legal victories in hand, she’s sharing her life story, and what it was like on the stand.
June 17, 2025Updated 1:44 p.m. ET
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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?”
