Truth, Lie, or False Memory: The E. Jean Carroll Question

This is the first in a series on E. Jean Carroll v. Donald Trump, drawn from the public record. It does not set out to prove what happened in that dressing room.

Three possibilities remain open, and the record forecloses none: that she told the truth, that she lied, or — the possibility this series takes seriously, because the evidence raises it — that what she remembers is a false memory: an event her mind assembled and came to believe, sincerely and completely, though it never happened.  She thinks it happened. It may not have. The series will weigh that question.

It will also follow how a decades-old accusation, unwitnessed and unproven, became two verdicts and $88 million — and what that reveals about a rule of evidence, Federal Rule of Evidence 415, that hollows out due process in — and only in — sexual misconduct cases, with implications far beyond this one case.

E. Jean Carroll and the Rule That Made Injustice Legal

E. Jean Carroll sued Donald Trump twice over a life-altering encounter she claims occurred at Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale Fifth Avenue department store, in late 1995 or early 1996.

Trump said it never happened.

Who They Were

Trump was a 49-year-old Manhattan real estate developer when Carroll said the meeting occurred.

Back in 1996, his name was on buildings and in the tabloids. His 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, had made him famous beyond New York.

Forbes estimated his net worth that year at about $450 million, nearly a billion in 2026 dollars.

She was 52 and had been writing "Ask E. Jean," an advice column for Elle magazine, since 1993. Her column was quick and comic, full of jokes and euphemisms. It depended on the reader's understanding of what was unsaid.

She advised on and presented herself as an authority on sex and relationships, and offered steady counsel to women to be tough, depend on no man. Never see yourself as a victim.

Twenty-seven years later, she would ask a jury in Manhattan federal court to decide that she was the victim. She said what happened to her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, lingerie in hand, with Donald Trump, devastated her life.

Whatever happened or did not happen in that luxury department store, whether real, partly real, wholly fabricated, or imagined, has run through her own admission. through her mind so many times, over so many years, that it has become the central fact of her life.

The Encounter

Her story, which Trump denies, is this:

She was leaving Bergdorf Goodman early one evening. It was twilight time. The date is uncertain. Trump was coming in.

“Hey, you’re that advice lady!,” he said

She said, “hey, you're that real estate tycoon.”

“I am surprised at how good-looking he is,” she wrote, 23 years later, when she first disclosed the encounter in a book. “We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light, but he looks prettier than ever.”

He was wearing “a faultless topcoat.” She was wearing a black wool Donna Karan coat dress and “sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels,” raising her height to 6 feet 1 inch, she said.

Trump stood 6'3”.

He said, “I need to buy a gift, come help me. Come help me. Come advise me.”

“Oh!” she said, “For whom?”

“A girl,” he says.

“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?”

He said, “Not this one,” or “Not this time.”

They were standing just inside the revolving door. She pointed to the handbags. “How about—”

“No!” he said.

“Or … a hat!” she said. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”

He held up a fur hat.

“Please,” she said,  “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”

He coddled the fur hat.

She asked, “How old is the lady in question?”

“How old are you?” Trump asked.

“I’m 52,” she said.

“You’re so old!”

He dropped the hat, looked toward the escalator, and said, “Lingerie!” Or “Underwear!”

The Lingerie Department

They strolled to the escalator.

There were very few people in the store. In the lingerie section, there was no one at all.

He grabbed a lacy, see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter.

“Go try this on!” he said.

“You try it on,” she said, laughing. “It’s your color.”

“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at her.

“It goes with your eyes,” she said, laughing, and threw it back.

Holding the body suit against her, he said, “You’re in good shape. I wanna see how this looks.”

“But it’s your size,” she said, laughing.

“Come on,” he says, taking her arm. “Let’s put this on.”

They headed to the dressing rooms, his arm on hers.

Carroll was laughing.

“I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!,” she said she thought to herself.

There was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. And no customers either. Bergdorf’s dressing rooms are usually locked until a patron wants to try something on. Oddly, the dressing-room door was wide open.

She went into the room first. He followed, she said, and shut the door, but did not lock it.

What Happened Next

Suddenly, “the universe changed,” she said.

He shoved her up against the wall, hard. Her head banged loudly. If someone was in the dressing room next door, she said, they would have heard it. If there had been a sales attendant outside the dressing rooms, they would have heard it.

It was so hard that it hurt.

Then he put his mouth against her lips.

She shoved him back and started laughing.

He seized her arms and pushed her up against the wall a second time, pinning her with his shoulder, his whole weight against her chest.

She kept laughing.

His head was beside hers, breathing. His mouth against her, kissing her.

She said she thought “What. What. What. No.”

He leaned down, put his hand under her coat-dress, and pulled down her tights.

By her own admission, she was laughing consistently after the kiss.

Wearing a shirt, tie, suit jacket, and overcoat, he opened his overcoat, unzipped his pants, and forced his fingers around her private area.

She pushed him back. Her one arm was pinned down. Her other arm held her purse. She didn’t let go of her purse, she said.

She did not recall telling him no. Nor did she scream. Or cry for help.

She was laughing but also stamping on his feet; she said, in her four-inch-high heels, trying to “wiggle out” from under him.

Three Minutes

His fingers went into her vagina, which she said was painful. He put his hand inside of her, and curved his finger. Then he inserted his penis halfway — or completely, she was not certain — inside her.

She tried to push him off with one hand. She still held her purse with the other. Finally, after about three minutes, she got a knee up high enough to push him out and off.

She didn't say anything to him. She simply turned, opened the door, and ran out of the dressing room.

She said she did not believe he had ejaculated.

Outside the dressing room, she didn't scream or call for help. She said she ran because she was afraid Trump might be coming after her, fearful he would follow and maybe grab her.

She didn’t remember seeing any person, no attendant or customer in the lingerie department. She ran for the escalator and took it down six floors. Again, she didn't see a single person in the entire store.

She landed on the main floor, though she noticed no one. She ran through the store, out the door, and onto Fifth Avenue.

There were people again.

No Report, No Proof

She did not go to the police. Or to the hospital. No rape kit. No examination. No eyewitness.

She said she told her friend, Lisa Birnbach, a writer, that same evening.

According to Carroll, Birnbach was the first to tell her that what happened was rape.

“He raped you,” Birnbach said, when she told her the story. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

Carroll refused and asked her to keep it quiet.

That very night, Carroll said, “the visions would wash over me. I couldn't — it was horrible. Not only did it happen in Bergdorf, but it happened over and over and over in my mind because I did not have the ability to strike to get the visions out of my head.”

A day or two later, after multiple visions, she told Carol Martin, a journalist and former television news anchor.

According to Carroll, Martin grew very quiet. Then she grasped both of Carroll’s hands within her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.”

Two Decades of Silence

Carroll went on writing her column, with some success, for more than two decades.

The column was bold, brash, comic, and worldly, full of judgments about sex, men, the proper way for a woman to move through life, and the elegant management of oneself. Its charm rested on authority. E. Jean was always the woman with the answer, never the woman waiting anxiously for one.

Readers asked the questions. Carroll answered them.

She never spoke about the visions.

It could happen any time, she said.

“I would be cooking pasta or just going about my normal day, and in would slide just a picture of him going like this into the dressing room or hitting my head or feeling his fingers jammed up inside of me and then with effort I could move those out of my mind.”

At trial, she was asked:

Q. Can you give the jurors a sense, or examples of what — what would you see? What does a vision sort of look like?

A. Just recently, I pulled over to the side of the [road] on my way home because it was late and I thought I would rest my eyes and just take a quick nap. I closed my eyes. I must have fallen asleep. Because when I woke, I felt Donald Trump again on top of me, his huge — I thought for a minute I was going to die because I couldn't breathe. That's the sudden, horrible kind.”

The Dress

During all those years, she kept the coat-dress.

She wrote about the incident for the first time 23 years later, when she was 75.

About the dress, she said. “The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades… or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”

All these twenty-plus years between the time she said the Trump-incident occurred and the time she disclosed it, she said she never had sex.

The Hypocrite

She also did not disclose her decades of abstinence. This was curious, and some say perhaps dishonest, because she wrote a column based on giving sex advice and relationships with men.

By her own later account, her column was built on concealment.

For decades, she wrote, as the confident female sexual authority, “the longtime sex columnist for Elle” — while privately, she says, she had withdrawn from sex entirely and told no one.

She later admitted she was a "fake" and a "hypocrite."

She was capable of sustaining, for years, a vivid public self that did not match the private one and of keeping the gap hidden.

There was a way she justified it, too.

She had sex in her dreams.  In those dreams, her sex was real.

She later said, “I had orgasms in my sleep. That’s how my body handled it because my brain — feeble nut ball up here — couldn’t handle it. But the body knew, oh, E. Jean’s asleep, let’s have an orgasm. So I could be honest when I was writing to my readers about this experience.”

Editor's note: Part Two examines, among other matters, the book What Do We Need Men For? — the comic road-trip memoir in which Carroll first told the story of Trump and the dressing room, and how that story would change: lightly, in fact comedically, told on the page, it became, by the time she sought damages at trial, the devastating center of a ruined life.

What happened to Donald Trump in a civil courtroom has a criminal parallel. The same kind of reasoning — accusation treated as evidence, pattern treated as proof of guilt — ran through the federal prosecution of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz of OneTaste, a case built on the testimony of witnesses who may themselves no longer be certain of what was done to them and what memory, suggestion, and years of retelling supplied. This series will examine the two cases side by side.

Read More

Believe the Accuser: The Legal Weapon That Hit Trump in the Carroll Case and OneTaste in Brooklyn