A woman is not a person, not in this America. Not now, when centuries of ground gained have been ripped out from under us. Our rights — the offering voters sacrificed because of “economic insecurity.” Our dignity — taken because a generation of lonely men couldn’t have access to our bodies.
It’s in an America once again writhing under the authoritarianism of a second Trump administration that E. Jean Carroll has published another book.
This month, Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed in their driveway. Authorities say the suspect, Vance Boelter, had a list of other targets that included Planned Parenthood clinics, abortion service providers and activists.
Also this month, Adriana Smith, a pregnant Georgia woman who had been declared brain-dead, was finally allowed to die after doctors delivered her baby via C-section. Her family had been forced to keep her on life support for months because of the state’s strict abortion ban, and they described the months their loved one was on life support, solely as an incubator for a fetus, as an awful experience. Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, told NBC affiliate WXIA of Atlanta, “I’m not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy. But I’m saying we should have had a choice.”
It’s in this America, an America once again writhing under the authoritarianism of a second 2 Fast 2 Furious Trump administration — a remake that is meaner, quicker and crueler than the last — that E. Jean Carroll has published another book.
Carroll is notable for her long and storied career as a journalist and advice columnist. But she’ll be forever remembered as the woman who sued the president for sexual abuse and won. In 2023, Donald Trump was found liable for defamation and sexual abuse. In 2024, a jury found him guilty of defaming Carroll and ordered him to pay her $83 million, an amount that she has yet to see a dime of. Recently, a court ruled that the State Department cannot step in as the defendant on behalf of the president. Carroll, now 81, might not live long enough to see the payout.
But she’s still here, still writing, still fighting. Her book, “Not My Type,” is an account of her trials against the president. The litany of humiliations that lawyers, journalists and the public subjected her to. Picking apart her sex life, her looks, her career — and why she didn’t scream. It would be easy to read the book as a tragedy, but in the hands of Carroll, a singular stylist who uses quick asides, charming anecdotes, goofball humor and court transcripts to detail her fight against the most powerful man in America, it feels hopeful.
She’s not a woman defined by the worst men who have ever touched her. She’s still so wholly E Jean.
She’s not a woman defined by the worst men who have ever touched her. She’s still so wholly E. Jean. Right there, on the page. Erratic. Funny. Full of life.
The title of the book comes from the phrase the president used to deny Carroll’s accusations. As if men assault only women they’re attracted to. Authoritarianism, like sexual assault, is premised on rigid control. On letting people know where they belong, on deciding who is a person, and who is not, who gets to be a human and who’s just an object. The strict ordering of our lives and our bodies is foundational to contemporary fascism.
And we see the enforcement of this authoritarianism playing out with mass deportations of immigrants, women fighting for their lives in hospital parking lots, trying to decide how sick they have to be to get health care, trans people being denied health care. Carroll herself was one such woman, who existed then and now, outside of the rigid control of gendered conformity. Sure, she was a beauty queen, but she was also ambitious, divorced (twice), without children, a woman with a brash and unique voice. A woman unmanned, exuberant, beautiful and free, whom the current vice president might sneeringly call a “childless cat lady.” A woman who kept her voice and her singular vision, even after men tried to shove her back into a dressing room and abuse her. She got out. But I don’t know how many of us will. I think a lot about the immigrant women deported by ICE, the Black women disproportionately suffering maternal mortality, trans women denied their rights, the women and children leveled by American bombs in foreign countries. So many of the women who spoke up during the #MeToo movement of 2017 never saw justice. This is a presidency built on the bodies of women. But we don’t all have to play along. This book and Carroll are living testaments to the wisdom of the late columnist Molly Ivins, herself a woman who resisted boundaries, who exhorted people to “keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t forget to have fun doin’ it. Be outrageous … rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.” What E. Jean Carroll has given us is not just an account of a trial, but a manual for a fight. A field guide for fighting fascism and winning, and not just winning but triumphing and remaining wholly, exuberantly, exasperatingly human.
Lyz Lenz is the author of the book "This American Ex-Wife." She lives in Iowa and writes the newsletter “Men Yell at Me.” 
