E. Jean Carroll's Uneasy Peace

She was a gonzo journalist called "feminism's answer Hunter S. Thompson." Then she met Donald Trump. In the year since defeating him in court, she's written a secret book — and learned to shoot.

Hi there! It’s me, your host, Jessica Bennett, and a quick note to say I’ve got a new job. After 10 years of writing for The Times, I’m returning to magazines — New York Magazine, specifically. This is my first feature for them, out in print this week, about another magazine writer, E. Jean Carroll. She’s also on Substack, which is why you see her name above. I’ll be back here with more soon, and thanks as always for reading. — Jessica

“I think it’s a handsome-looking gun, don’t you?” E. Jean Carroll asked. We were perched against the glass counter of a gun shop just off a highway in New York State, near the New Jersey border, and Carroll — a slight blonde in a vintage Donna Karan riding jacket and pink aviator sunglasses — was gripping a 20-gauge Mossberg shotgun against her 107-pound frame. Tommy, a red-faced retired cop and Carroll’s unofficial bodyguard, was assessing the fit. Could she hold it comfortably? Did she like how it felt? How quickly did she think she could get to it in a pinch?

Carroll and her shotgun, Aphrodite, at home. Photo by Elinor Carucci for New York Magazine

The room had stained corkboard ceilings and fluorescent lights. Tacked to a wall, next to an outdated pinup calendar, was a poster depicting Ronald Reagan as Rambo — RONBO — his head superimposed on Sylvester Stallone’s shirtless, oiled body, firing a machine gun. To our left was an indoor shooting range; a group of young Orthodox Jewish men peered through the soundproof glass, watching a shooter in an orange safety vest fire toward the head of a human silhouette. Next to the cash register, propped up on the counter, was a roll of toilet paper printed with Hillary Clinton’s face. The cashier was a cheerful man in a handlebar mustache and a LET’S GO BRANDON hat.

“We are awash in testosterone,” Carroll whispered as I scanned the man in the hat to determine if he recognized her.

Honestly you couldn't make this up? Crappy photos by me

It was February of last year, just a couple weeks after Carroll, a former advice columnist, TV personality, and — this part is often forgotten — celebrated magazine writer, had been awarded a stunning sum of money in her second of two lawsuits against Donald Trump: $83.3 million plus interest. For days now, her face, and that recognizable blonde bob, had been plastered all over the news; she was the accuser who’d won — and beaten him not once but twice. Trump was railing about the “witch hunt” against him, calling Carroll a liar and accusing her of colluding with “Democrat operatives,” repeating the very claims for which he’d just been found liable for defamation — and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, was threatening to sue him again. Almost overnight, Carroll had become a hero of the era, of both the “resistance” and Me Too. And everybody wanted to know what she was going to do with the money.

The new winnings came on top of $5 million already owed to her from the first trial, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. The funds had been sitting untouched in a court-controlled trust for seven months. Her friends were trying to convince her to rent an apartment in the city — the money would come to her soon enough, they thought — but for now Carroll was staying home in the secluded cabin upstate where she’d lived for two decades.

Carroll's cabin, which she calls her "hovel," is a time capsule filled with fascinating objects. She brought the fringe leather jacket with her to New York when she moved from Montana; the severed head is her childhood doll, Tony Sue.

The day before the trip to the gun shop, the local police chief had knocked on her front door. In his freshly starched blues, he’d taken an awkward seat on a chair upholstered in old flannel shirts and explained, kindly and somewhat apologetically, that Carroll would need to turn in her handgun. For nearly five years — since she’d first accused the sitting president of rape and the death threats had begun — she’d slept with a loaded revolver, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, next to her bed. She’d inherited it from her father, and though it looked more like a prop from a western than an actual weapon, she’d fired it enough to know it worked. But she didn’t have a license, a fact that Trump’s defense attorneys had recently made public.

Carroll agreed to turn it in, then immediately picked up the phone. She may not have had a license for a handgun, but in her part of the state, she wouldn’t need one for a shotgun. While she was away for the trial, her dog walkers had reported that a strange car seemed to be staking out her house — driving up and down her street, parking at the top of her long driveway — and she didn’t want to be there without armed protection for even a couple days. And so as the police chief was making his way down the wooded path to his cruiser, her dogs trotting after him, Carroll rang up Tommy and asked if he would take us to the nearest shop.

The total, for the new shotgun and two hot-pink pepper sprays, came to $611.99. Carroll handed over her ID and credit card and declared herself famished.

Over the next few months, she would be on something of a grand victory lap. In April, Time named her one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2024” along with Dua Lipa and Taraji P. Henson. In May, she was the keynote speaker at a dinner for Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women,” where an audience in tailored suits, including Melinda French Gates, cheered as she said she knew in her gut that Trump would lose the election. In July, Rolling Stone and Variety honored her with their joint Truth Seeker Award. She was photographed with celebrities; a party was thrown in her honor at Superiority Burger in the East Village. Throughout much of it, she was trailed by a camera crew for a documentary about her life. Studios wanted to buy her life rights.

But by the late fall, she was mostly on her own again, back on Frog Island — what she calls her compound in the woods. The invitations came less often. The culture was shifting.

Carroll at home, photographed for New York by Elinor Carucci. Isn’t it remarkably similar to the one of Hunter S. Thompson below, whose biography Carroll wrote, after showing up and moving into his cabin in Woody Creek, Colorado, in 1993?

I highly recommend the resulting book, titled Hunter. It is so insane it reads like fiction, but it was well-reviewed, and after an extensive fact check I am sure it is very much accurate — acid, hot tub, sharp objects and all.

Now, the documentary is almost complete, and it is supposed to premiere at Telluride late this summer — but the filmmaker has struggled to raise funding. It’s safe to say Me Too has been over for some time. Bill Cosby has been free since 2021, his conviction for sexual assault thrown out on a technicality. In Harvey Weinstein’s recent retrial in New York, he had the support of prominent mainstream defenders such as Joe Rogan. (Weinstein was acquitted for one of his three alleged sex crimes and reconvicted for another, while a mistrial was declared for the third.) Andrew Cuomo, previously contrite in the face of sexual-harassment claims, is running for mayor and leading in most polls. Trump, of course, is once again commander-in-chief of the country, grubbing forward, loosening his belt with power. The millions of dollars he owes Carroll — almost $100 million in total, including interest — are locked in limbo. He has appealed both verdicts, and Carroll’s lawyers suspect he may fight all the way to the Supreme Court. (A lawyer representing Trump in the litigation did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carroll, in the time since the second trial, has quietly written a new book. Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, a minute-by-minute, motion-by-motion retelling of the two court cases, written in the choppy, gonzo style Carroll became known for in the 1980s, publishes June 17 and has been kept entirely secret until now — so tightly guarded that Carroll herself did not have a copy until a week before it arrived on store shelves. The book had been sold in March 2024, but after the election, conversations between Carroll and her editor moved to Signal, page proofs were delivered by hand, and booksellers were required to sign NDAs. There was a nebulous fear of what the president might do: “This is Trump,” Carroll’s publicist told me. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Carroll, who loves a stunt, couldn’t help but enjoy it all a little. “Jessica,” she’s repeated, “nobody knows!”

I visited her again at her cabin earlier this month. She told me she hasn’t had to use the shotgun, but she’s ready if she needs to: “There’s one in the chamber.” She practices a drill, sometimes twice a day: standing up from her bed, grabbing the gun from its place against the wall, raising it, and releasing the safety. The gun is named Aphrodite, she says, because “she’s long, lusty, and lethal.”

I asked Carroll what it feels like to be living through a backlash; it was on my mind lately. But she countered immediately. We were living, she said, through the first time period “in a hideous human history” when we had at least a small inkling of how “chock-full of predators” the “rulers’ houses” are. “This is good, Jessica,” she said. “This is stunning.”

Keep reading in New York Mag here.

(Don’t have a subscription? You can get a copy on newsstands, or view my illicit PDF here. But pls consider subscribing!)

Here’s me turning off the water in Carroll’s kitchen, after the kitchen faucet sprung a leak, her lawyer to my left. Mostly I am just pleased with myself for being capable of doing such a thing, though we did need to immediately call her handyman after.