Trump Accuser: I Haven't Been With a Man Since Trump

E. Jean Carroll keeps a revolver by her bed, and it's loaded. The Elle advice columnist who accused President Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room decades ago says she brought out the ammo after getting death threats on social media. "I've always had a gun," she tells the Guardian in a wide-ranging interview. "When I'm doing Skype calls with my friends, I like to pull it out. But I've never had it loaded. Not until now." Kicking back in her small upstate New York home—really a "cabin in the woods," per the paper—Carroll unloads on men, rape, and the response to her new book, What Do We Need Men For? in which she accuses Trump of attacking her.

• "Oh! That says more than anything I've heard," she says when told where the flagship Barnes & Noble in Manhattan placed her book. "The fourth floor women's studies section. You want to know how to bury a book? That’s how you do it."
• #MeToo inspired her to write a "most hideous men of my life list" that ended up including 21 names, she says. "There were so many! I was horrified." Trump was number 20.
• She grew uneasy about her own silence after women alleged sexual misconduct against Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape. "I started to think I was the biggest fraud that walks—I'm telling my correspondents what to do but haven’t opened my own lips about anything, ever." So she included Trump in her book.
• Any doubt it was really Trump who attacked her? "No. Donald Trump was the one and only. He knew everybody. He greeted everybody in the streets. He was charming. Recognizing him was a big deal for me. Zero. ZERO."
• When she takes partial blame for entering that Bergdorf Goodman dressing room with Trump, the interviewer protests. "No," says Carroll. "It's the responsibility of the woman, too. It's equal. Men can't control themselves."
• In the book, Carroll says she never had sex again after her alleged Trump encounter. "It's just a fact. I think it's because of my age, and that I haven’t been lucky enough to meet somebody."

(Trump says he never met Carroll, but a photograph shows otherwise.)