In an excerpt from her memoirs being published next week, author and columnist E. Jean Carroll describes her life of writing for well over 50 years and brings us a list of her awful encounters with sexual assault, from a classmate at Indiana University, to a Girl Scout camp director, to former CBS head honcho Les Moonves, and also one more hideous slug of a cretin who assaulted her in a department store bathroom in 1996, a man by the name of Donald J. Trump.
Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said: “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.
This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).
Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”
And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”
I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.
“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”
“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”
“A girl,” he says.
“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.
“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.
As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”
“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.
“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”
I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.
“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”
What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.
“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.
“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.
“I’m 52,” I tell him.
“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.
I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:
Did I report it to the police?
No.
Did I tell anyone about it?
Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”
My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)
Trump denies ever meeting Carroll.
The picture included in the excerpt is Trump meeting Carroll. The only newspaper that even put this story on the front page this weekend was the Washington Post.
Here endeth the lesson.
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