E. Jean Carroll

Elizabeth Jean Carroll (born December 12, 1943) is an American journalist and advice columnist. Her "Ask E. Jean" column appeared in Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019 and was ranked one of the five best magazine columns (along with Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine) by the Chicago Tribune in 2003.

In June 2019, Carroll accused Les Moonves and Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s. Both Moonves and Trump denied the allegations.

Elizabeth Jean “E. Jean” Carroll was born on December 12, 1943 in Detroit, Michigan.Carroll also went by "Jeannie".Her father, Thomas F. "Tom" Carroll, Jr., was an inventor, and her mother, Betty (née McKinney) Carroll, was a retired Allen County, Indiana politician. Carroll was raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She attended Indiana University, where she was a Pi Beta Phi and a cheerleader and was crowned Miss Indiana University. In 1964, representing Indiana University, she won the Miss Cheerleader USA title. Carroll appeared on the mid-1980s edition of Card Sharks hosted by Bob Eubanks.

As advice columnist

Carroll's "Ask E. Jean" column has appeared in Elle magazine since 1993. It was ranked one of the five best magazine columns (along with Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine) by the Chicago Tribune in 2003.

Carroll's column became known due to her 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. Amy Gross, former editor-in-chief of Elle and currently the editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine, describes the "Ask E. Jean" debut as "though we had put her on a bucking bronco and her answers were the cheers and whoops and hollers of a fearless woman having a good ol time."

NBC's cable channel, America's Talking, produced the Ask E. Jean television show based on the column from 1994 to 1996 (at which time the channel became MSNBC). Entertainment Weekly called Carroll "the most entertaining cable talk show host you will never see." Jeff Jarvis in his review in TV Guide said watching E. Jean and her "robotic hyperactivity drove [him] batty". He went on: "However, then I listened to her and couldn't help liking her. E. Jean gives good advice". Carroll was nominated for an Emmy for her writing for Saturday Night Live (1985) and a Cable Ace Award for the Ask E. Jean show (1995).

Carroll also runs the AskEJean.com website, based on the Elle column, where users can type in questions and receive instant video answers on topics such as careers, beauty, sex, men, diet, "sticky situations", and friends. Users can also join the Advice Vixens, where advice is provided by other users. "Top Campus Sex Columnists" features college advice columnists from across America.

Journalism and books

In 2002, Carroll's "The Cheerleaders", which appeared in Spin, was selected as one of the year's "Best True Crime Reporting" pieces. It appeared in Best American Crime Writing, edited by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, and Nicholas Pileggi (Pantheon Books, 2002).Carroll was "Miss Cheerleader USA" in 1964.

Carroll has been a contributing editor to Esquire, Outside, and Playboy magazines. Her focus is "the heart of the heart of the country". For an April 1992 issue of Esquire, she chronicled the lives of basketball groupies in a story called "Love in the Time of Magic". In June 1994, she went to Indiana and investigated why four white farm kids were thrown out of school for dressing like black artists in "The Return of the White Negro".

In "The Loves of My Life" (June 1995), she tracked down her old boyfriends and moved in with them and their wives. Bill Tonelli, her Esquire and Rolling Stone editor, has commented: "All of E. Jean's stories are pretty much the same thing. Which is: ‘What is this person like when he or she is in a room with E. Jean?' She's institutionally incapable of being uninteresting."

For Playboy (February 1988) at the height of the "Sensitive Man" era, E. Jean told her editors that "modern women run around complaining that they want a primitive man, so I thought it would be fun to come to New Guinea and find a real one." Carroll hiked into the Star Mountains with an Atbalmin tracker and a Telefomin warrior. She became the first white woman to walk from Telefomin to Munbil in the former West Irian Jaya, and nearly died.

For Outside, Carroll wrote about (among other things) taking Fran Lebowitz camping and going down the Colorado with a group of "Women Who Run With No Clothes On". Several of E. Jean's pieces for Outside have been included in various non-fiction collections such as The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years (Vintage Books, 1998), Out of the Noosphere: Adventure, Sports, Travel, and the Environment (Fireside, 1998) and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road (Traveler's Tales, 2003).

Carroll published What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal in June of 2019. The title refers to the 1729 satire, A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift.

Websites

In 2002, Carroll co-founded Greatboyfriends.com with her sister, Cande Carroll. On the site, women recommended their ex-boyfriends to each other. The Oprah Winfrey Show profiled the website in 2003. The Knot Inc. bought GreatBoyfriends in 2005. In 2004, she launched Catch27.com as a spoof of Facebook. On the site, people put their profiles on trading cards and buy, sell, and trade each other. The Boston Globe headline was "You Can't Buy Friends Like These... Well, Actually You Can." AskEJean.com was launched in 2007. Carroll is pictured and listed on the Tawkify website as co-founder, and an adviser to Tawkify's matchmaking team.

On June 21, 2019, Carroll wrote in New York magazine that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman store in New York City. BBC News described it as a rape allegation. After Trump denied the allegations, Carrol sued President Trump for defamation, however, a White House spokesperson described the lawsuit as "frivolous"Carroll wrote that she had not had sexual intercourse with anyone since the alleged assault.Two people she told, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin, confirmed with New York that they indeed had such conversations with Carroll. The essay was part of an excerpt of Carroll's book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, which was published on July 2, 2019. The White House and Trump denied the allegation. The next day, Trump denied having ever met Carroll or knowing of her. However, in the New York magazine article, Carroll provided a photograph which showed her meeting Trump in 1987 along with her then-husband and Trump's then-wife Ivana. The two friends in whom Carroll had confided appeared on a podcast of the New York Times; they were writer Lisa Birnbach and news anchor Carol Martin. Carroll refused to say she was "raped", instead choosing to describe it thus: "My word is fight."

In a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, she explained her decision not to call her assault a "rape".Instead, she described it as a "fight" because then she would not be considered the "victim".

Carroll has also alleged that, in the mid-1990s, media executive Les Moonves sexually assaulted her in an elevator after she had interviewed Moonves for a story. Moonves has denied the allegation.

Carroll currently resides in upstate New York. She was formerly married to reporter John Johnson.

• 1985: Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars, and Other Modern Girls, Bantam Books, ISBN 9780553050882
• 1993: Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, Dutton, ISBN 9780525935681
• 1997: A Dog in Heat Is a Hot Dog and Other Rules to Live By , a collection of her Ask E. Jean columns, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 9780671568146
• 2004: Mr. Right, Right Now HarperCollins, ISBN 9780060530280
• 2019: What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 9781250215444