E. Jean Carroll has been through the wringer. The 81-year-old had already had a long and illustrious career in journalism, publishing, and television before she was thrust into the national spotlight for suing President Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. While the lawsuit resulted in a jury awarding her many millions of dollars, the president still takes every opportunity to sling mud at Carroll in public. But, as she declared in an Instagram post unveiling her brand-new book, “a woman is never too old to get even.”
The book is called Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, and it was kept under wraps until its publication. Carroll discusses the secrecy surrounding the book and its fascinating contents during an interview with our very own Katie Couric.
“Why did we have to keep it a secret? We didn’t want the White House to hear about it,” Carroll explains on Next Question. “Who knows from one instant to the next what the White House is going to do about anything?”
Even so, she never doubted that writing it was the right thing to do. “If you had been behind the scenes of the two trials and seen what was going on, it was so funny and so absurd and so out of this world that I couldn’t help myself,” Carroll tells Katie. “Oh my God, Shakespeare could not have created the characters that were surrounding me.”
In Not My Type, Carroll is unsparing in her assessment of not only Trump but also his legal team. Case in point: the president’s defense lawyer, Alina Habba, who now serves as a U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Carroll writes that Habba has “cheekbones like pickleball paddles and wide-set eyes as lovely as a baby seal’s.” Carroll is equally descriptive of Habba’s surprising behavior in court.
“She is extremely intelligent, she has a beautiful voice, and she is deliciously arrogant,” Carroll says. “She didn’t know diddly squat about the law. Didn’t know how to introduce a document.”
As for the president himself, Carroll has a sharp sense of humor about the way he’s treated her. For one thing, she included an infamous quote from Trump as a blurb to promote the book itself: “I don’t know who she is,” which he said about Carroll from the bench in the courtroom, loud enough for the jury to hear.
“I could overhear Trump saying that repeatedly, Katie — repeatedly throughout the trial,” Carroll shares. “He was so close to me. If I turned around and reached, I could grab him by his silly little Sandra Dee hair…And not only could I hear him, I could feel him. He was flopping his arms, and he was sort of spitting and hissing.”
If it’s not clear by now, trust us that Carroll is the kind of evocative storyteller you must witness for yourself. Watch her full conversation with Katie in the video above, including the emotional aftermath of her court battle with Trump, the impact of his continued defamation, and how she found catharsis by writing so honestly about her trauma.
