: A Modest Proposal, Carroll accused CBS CEO Les Moonves and Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s.

[5] On July 19, 2023, Judge Kaplan found that Trump did rape her as the term is understood "in common modern parlance",[6] although not “in the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law”.

[7] On January 26, 2024, a jury found Trump liable for defamation against Carroll regarding his remarks after the first verdict, and awarded her an additional $83.3 million in damages.

Widely read, it was acclaimed for Carroll's opinions on sex, her insistence that women should "never never" structure their lives around men, and her compassion for letter-writers experiencing difficult life situations.

[20][21] When it debuted, Amy Gross, a former editor-in-chief of Elle, compared the column to putting Carroll on a "bucking bronco", describing her responses to readers as "the cheers and whoops and hollers of a fearless woman having a good ol' time.

[26] From 1994 through 1996, Carroll was the host and producer of the Ask E. Jean television series that aired on NBC's America's Talking—the predecessor to MSNBC.

[29] In addition to writing for magazines including The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, Carroll served as a contributing editor for Outside,[30][13][31] Esquire,[32][33][34] New York,[35] and Playboy.

It appeared in Best American Crime Writing, edited by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, and Nicholas Pileggi (Pantheon Books, 2002).

Carroll said they ended up in a dressing room together, the door of which was shut, and Trump forcefully kissed her, pulled down her tights, and raped her with his penis before she was able to escape.

She stated that she was "filing this (lawsuit) on behalf of every woman who has ever been harassed, assaulted, silenced, or spoken up only to be shamed, fired, ridiculed and belittled".

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham described the suit as "frivolous" and claimed Carroll's story was fraudulent.

[63] In September 2020, government lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that Trump had acted in his official capacity while responding to Carroll's accusation; they asserted that the Federal Tort Claims Act[a] grants their department the right to take the case from Trump's private lawyers and move it to federal court.

[65] Carroll's lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, stated that "Trump's effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent.

"[64] In October 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected the DOJ's motion, arguing that the president is not a government employee and that Trump's comments were not related to his job.

[clarification needed][70][71] On November 24, 2022, Carroll sued Trump for battery in New York under the Adult Survivors Act, a law passed the previous May that briefly allowed sexual assault victims to file civil suits regardless of expired statutes of limitations.

[57][75] On April 13, 2023, Carroll disclosed that part of her legal expenses were funded by Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, venture capitalist, and donor to the Democratic Party.

"[5] Following the verdict, during a Town Hall on CNN, Trump repeated that Carroll's narrative was a "fake", "made up story", invented by a "whack job".

[78] On May 23, 2023, seeking $10 million in additional damages, Carroll asked the court to expand the 2019 defamation lawsuit to include Trump's post-verdict remarks on CNN and Truth Social.

[80] In June 2023, Trump counter-sued Carroll for defamation, after she told CNN "yes he did" rape her, in response to a question about the jury not finding him liable for that offense.

[81] In September 2023, Judge Kaplan issued a summary judgment in Carroll's favor, stating that the facts established by the trial jury were indisputable.

Carroll stated that the bond size is "stupendous", and suggested that had the appeal not been submitted, she would have "quickly" begun seizing Trump’s assets.

[10] In a July 19, 2023, memorandum opinion, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, demonstrated Trump "raped" Carroll in the plain sense of the word.

[7] He clarified that despite the "far narrower definition" of rape under New York's statute, as the term is understood "in common modern parlance", and, citing definitions from the US Justice Department and the American Psychological Association, "the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that": "The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was 'raped' within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape,'" Kaplan wrote.

But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape.

[2] Carroll lived in Montana with her first husband Stephen Byers before moving to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist.