Why E. Jean Carroll Will Always Tell You She Is ‘Fine, Fabulous’

The following day, her close friend, the writer Lisa Birnbach, further detailed this approach. Taking the witness stand, she recalled that Ms. Carroll had phoned her immediately after the alleged incident with Mr. Trump “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional,” but that the subject did not come up between them again for another quarter century. “Ms. Carroll is a very up person; she is not a victim,” Ms. Birnbach said. “Instead of wallowing, she puts on lipstick, dusts herself off and moves on.”

Before the eruption of the #MeToo movement, this had served as the operating mode for generations of women who felt they had little recourse to address the injustices they faced at the whims of predatory men.

Ms. Carroll’s legal team also called Jessica Leeds, the former stockbroker, now 81, who came forward several years ago to accuse Mr. Trump of groping her on a flight to New York in the late 1970s. Assuming nothing would come of any complaint, she too had tucked the episode away — a kind of sublimation with which the three women on the jury, all in their 50s and 60s, might find themselves familiar.

In the mid-1990s, decades after the sexual revolution, nearing the declining days of the AIDS crisis and the heyday of elite media, New York seemed to belong to women like E. Jean Carroll. Having grown up in a red brick schoolhouse in Indiana, she became a cheerleader, a beauty queen, a feminist Hemingway — she claimed to be the first woman to walk from Telefomin in Papua New Guinea, over the mountains to the border of Irian Jaya — and then, like all the Sister Carries and Carrie Bradshaws before and after, she was an aspiring star who arrived in the city to impress, to beguile, to create, to experience all the stories, to tell them, to miss out on nothing.

In interviews over the past few years, Ms. Carroll has talked about how “delicious” it was to bump into Donald Trump in a revolving door at Bergdorf’s, when aimless luxury department-store shopping was still a cherished pastime. This was an anecdote she imagined she would “dine out” on forever. Almost nothing would have compelled her to say, “Sorry! Running out!” when he asked her to help him pick out a gift for a woman he knew. The prospect was too dishy. A pair of big media personalities — Ms. Carroll was a well-known advice columnist by then — meeting so unexpectedly to do something vaguely conspiratorial. It could have easily supplied the opening scene of a Nora Ephron movie.

At the outset, the story seemed so paradigmatically “New York,” Ms. Carroll explained in her testimony. Until it wasn’t.