Longtime Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll said Wednesday that the magazine fired her due to insults leveled by President Trump after she accused him last year of raping her in the 1990s.
“Because Trump ridiculed my reputation, laughed at my looks, & dragged me through the mud, after 26 years, ELLE fired me,” Carroll tweeted Wednesday. “I don’t blame Elle. It was the great honor of my life writing ‘Ask E. Jean.’ I blame @realdonaldtrump.”
Carroll claimed in her 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?” that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations and accused Carroll of lying, saying she was “not my type” and claiming never to have met her despite a photo of the two together, which Trump dismissed as him “standing with my coat on in a line.”
After Trump accused Carroll of lying, she filed a defamation suit in New York state court. Attorneys for Trump have called for the suit to be delayed until another defamation lawsuit by former “The Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who has also accused Trump of sexually assaulting her, can be resolved.
“Nothing in Trump’s extensive history of personal litigation during his presidency supports his bald assertion that discovery into whether he lied about raping Carroll will harm the national interest,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a filing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan Tuesday, The New York Times reported.
Kaplan’s filing included an email dated Dec. 11 from Elle executive managing editor Erin Hobday saying Carroll was being terminated. “We and your readers so appreciate your many years of work for the magazine, and the wonderful columns you contributed to our publication,” Hobday wrote, according to the Times. “We will miss you tremendously.”
The Hill has reached out to Hearst Magazines, Elle’s parent company, for comment.