E. Jean Carroll Honored With Truth Seekers Award, Calls Donald Trump Verdict: ‘Happiest Day of My Life’

Author and journalist E. Jean Carroll revealed what motivated her to go public with her rape accusations against former President Donald Trump and speculated on how he is handling Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy at Thursday’s Variety & Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit, presented by Paramount+, in New York.

Her attorney Roberta Kaplan, who won two judgments against Trump, was also onstage for the Truth Seekers chat with Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stone. Carroll’s honor closed out the annual conference spotlighting documentary production and unscripted programming.

Stone asked, “When Donald Trump announced he was running for president, when the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape came up, what were you thinking at those different points?”

“I was never, never, ever going to speak about this. And then both my parents died and that freed me,” Carroll said, explaining that her parents both died in 2016, shortly after the #MeToo movement began to gain traction nationally. “Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Ronan Farrow came forward with the Weinstein story, and women all over the country started to say what happened to them. I thought, ‘This is a possibility.'”

“It’s terrifying because if you come forward, you’re gonna lose your job. You know he’s going to retaliate,” she recalled. Carroll recounted how she told Kaplan the story, and Kaplan replied “That is so crazy, it’s gotta be true,” and took the case.

In the days after her 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” came out, Trump called her a liar 26 times.

The day the second verdict for defamation came down in January 2024 was “the happiest day of my life,” Carroll said.

Carroll and Kaplan also discussed how they thought Trump must be handling Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy. “She’s driving him crazy with her laugh,” she surmised.

Kaplan concurred, “He cannot stand being upstaged and being beaten by a woman. All you have to do is have the kind of dignity that Jean had and that Kamala Harris has. And that makes him even crazier.”

“It’s all backwards, because I’m an old magazine writer,” Carroll said as she accepted the award from Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh. “My life has been extremely happy,” she continued. “Though there were moments that weren’t so happy.” Talking about her long career as a magazine journalist, she invoked the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, proclaiming, “Hunter, if you can hear me, I just won the Truth Seekers award from Rolling Stone magazine!”

Watch the full conversation above.