E. Jean

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Speaker 2 This episode contains a description of sexual abuse. Please use discretion.

Speaker 2 A few weeks ago, I visited Eugene Carroll at her house in the woods in New York. She offered to read me some of the messages she'd gotten online that day.

Speaker 1 Okay, here. Here's a typical.
You'll end up in jail, hopefully.

Speaker 1 Your day will come. Absolutely no evidence.
Okay. You'll never see a dime.

Speaker 1 Still making money off the grift, huh?

Speaker 1 And you are a liar.

Speaker 1 I'm surprised there's no, no, how ugly I am here.

Speaker 2 So it just keeps going. I mean, it won't stop.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no,

Speaker 1 these are pretty, this is actually, this puts me in a good mood because there's not even a mild threat here.

Speaker 2 Eugene Carroll has been getting messages like this since June 2019, when she first publicly accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in her Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.

Speaker 2 Eugene was a well-known writer by then.

Speaker 2 She'd moved to New York from Montana in her late 30s after she was assigned her first magazine story. In the 80s, she was hired to write for Saturday Night Live.

Speaker 2 And by the mid-90s, she was writing an advice column for L magazine called Ask Eugene, which was so popular, it was turned into a cable television show.

Speaker 2 Have you always been good at giving advice?

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 it's here's the thing. It's very I'm a cheerleader.

Speaker 1 So I figure out

Speaker 1 what the person

Speaker 1 wants me to tell them when they send the letter. And then I just tell them

Speaker 1 do it or don't do it. It's fairly simple.

Speaker 2 It's kind of a black and white thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then the gray area is when after I send the answer, then I worry about it for days afterwards, sometimes weeks afterwards, sometimes months afterwards.

Speaker 1 But you really got to give them a solid yes or no.

Speaker 1 You know, that's why my column was liked, because many advice columnists will enter into the very fascinating gray parts. I'm not interested in the gray parts.
I either want you to do it or not do it.

Speaker 1 Life is short. You've got to do it or not do it, right?

Speaker 2 What's life like for you? I mean, what are you feeling in the mid-90s in New York?

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm living at 90 miles an hour. I have like three outfits.
I have a pair of cowgirl boots. I have my jeans.
I have, I'll show it to you. We'll walk over.
I have it sitting there.

Speaker 1 I have it hanging on my wall on the wall. It's a buckskin jacket.
I had a black corduroy shirt. I had a white dress shirt that I picked up off the street.
And I

Speaker 1 thought I was fabulous. Four o'clock in the morning, we'd be running down the boulevards.
We'd be going to Brazerie for a cup of coffee before at the end of the night.

Speaker 1 It was,

Speaker 1 magazines were at their peak. It was great.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about what happens

Speaker 2 when you run into Donald Trump in 1996. Tell me about that day.

Speaker 1 Well, at the time I had a talk show based on the Ask you Gene column in L. And it was called Ask Eugene.

Speaker 1 And it was on a network started by Roger Ailes, who went on to create Fox News. So I had a live talk show

Speaker 1 every day for one hour at four o'clock and it re-ran every night at 11.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I am

Speaker 1 coming out of Bergdorf's and I don't remember why I went there. It was after the show.

Speaker 1 It was around 6.37

Speaker 1 and I come out. And Donald Trump is standing on the other side, out in the street, ready to come in the door.
and he stopped me

Speaker 1 and he came on through and he said hey you're that advice columnist

Speaker 1 and I said hey you're that real estate mogul

Speaker 1 so he he knew me because Donald Trump watches television and then so he asked me

Speaker 1 for advice on buying a present for a girl And I thought, oh boy.

Speaker 2 What did he,

Speaker 2 did he say I need to buy it? I mean, do you remember what he he said to you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he said, I have to buy a present for a girl. Come advise me.

Speaker 1 What could be better?

Speaker 1 I was, you know, I could have dined out at Elaine's, you know, for five nights in a row on a story like that. So, of course, I said, yeah, let's, yeah.

Speaker 2 And what happened next?

Speaker 1 Well, I suggested he get her a handbag.

Speaker 1 He didn't like that idea. And the handbags at Bergdorf's.
I think your listeners probably know Bergdorf's.

Speaker 1 It's a seven-story building. It used to be a home of the Bergdorf Goodman family, and it's a luxury specialty store.
So when I said, How about a handbag?

Speaker 1 We're looking at six and seven and eight thousand dollar handbags in in the nineteen ninety beautiful works of art. But he d he wasn't interested in that.
And then I suggested a hat.

Speaker 1 And but, you know, he really wasn't and then he suggested lingerie. And I just thought the story was getting better and better.
So of course, we took the escalator up

Speaker 1 and we went to the lingerie department. There was nobody on the floor because it's 6:30, 7.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he snatched up a bodysuit that was on the counter. He picked it up and he held it up.
He said, Go, go put this on.

Speaker 1 I said, You put it on? What are you kidding? He said, No, no, no, you're in shape. Go put it on.
I said, No, you put it on. And at the time,

Speaker 1 it was very light, very funny, very joshing. It couldn't have been better.
I had written a sketch. I was a writer at Saturday Night Live.
I had written a sketch somewhat similar.

Speaker 1 So I'm thinking, this is hilarious.

Speaker 2 What was the sketch for Saturday Night Live?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 William Shatner.

Speaker 1 standing in front of a mirror in his underwear falling in love with himself. Nora Dunn is standing off, putting lipstick on,

Speaker 1 belittling him as he's he's he's telling himself, don't ever die, and things like that. So the sketch was somewhat similar, a guy in underwear standing in front of a mirror.

Speaker 1 So I pictured him putting this bodysuit on over his pants, which to me would have been hilarious. So he said, after you,

Speaker 1 he said, let's go put this on. He said, after you.
And I just walked in the dressing room, not thinking.

Speaker 2 Was he funny?

Speaker 1 He was light. He was like,

Speaker 1 let's go put this on. And then he did the big gesture after you, ma'am.
You know, everything overdone. And I did.

Speaker 1 And my intention, of course, was just to see what happened next. which was him putting those pants.
But now the door slammed behind me and he shoved me up against the wall and hit my head.

Speaker 1 Hit my head very bad.

Speaker 1 That's how fast it was. i walked in laughing and

Speaker 2 that was it you had no time to say anything

Speaker 1 i laughed to try to get the situation

Speaker 1 in hand uh no uh it happened so quickly i uh there was there was no words i couldn't say words i could laugh to think to

Speaker 1 you know kill any eroticism that was in him but when it starts it's it's a fight it's a it's a fight.

Speaker 2 And he was stronger than you?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I weighed 120 at the time. He weighed about 220 at the time.
He was 6'2 and a half, 6'3.

Speaker 1 I was

Speaker 1 5'9

Speaker 1 in my stocking feet, but I was wearing 4-inch heels, so I was 6'1.

Speaker 1 So he had 100 pounds on me. But at least I was tall enough.

Speaker 1 So it was

Speaker 1 once all that weight comes against you,

Speaker 1 once his whole weight came against me against my chest

Speaker 1 It was rough. But I got out.

Speaker 2 How'd you get out?

Speaker 1 First of all I was stamping but second of all

Speaker 1 I got my knee wedged up so I could push him out and off. That's all it took.
I just needed something and for some reason I still had my handbag in my hand. I didn't

Speaker 1 and I got out.

Speaker 2 Did he say anything when you walked out of the dressing room?

Speaker 1 Not that I recall. He could have.
I don't. I don't.
He could have.

Speaker 1 I remember clearly his breathing right next to my face. That I remember.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 I can remember that.

Speaker 2 What did you do when you got outside?

Speaker 1 I called my friend.

Speaker 1 What'd you say? I said, you're not going to believe it.

Speaker 2 Were you still laughing?

Speaker 1 Well, she told me, I don't think this is funny, Eugene, so I guess I was.

Speaker 2 The friend she called was Lisa Birnbach, who is also a well-known writer.

Speaker 1 So my psychiatrist, she

Speaker 1 has a theory of why I called Lisa Birnbach, because it was an odd person for me to call.

Speaker 1 It'd be just odd for me to call Lisa because she wasn't like my best friend at the time, but she was the funniest person I knew. I mean, nobody's funnier than Lisa Birnbach.

Speaker 1 She wrote the Preppy handbook. So apparently, I was thinking, if Lisa laughs, it's not so bad.

Speaker 2 What did you say to her?

Speaker 1 I said, you're not going to believe what happened.

Speaker 1 And Lisa also said, this is from her court transcript,

Speaker 1 he pulled down my tights. He pulled down my tights.
Apparently, I couldn't get over the fact that he pulled down my tights.

Speaker 1 And then, unfortunately, Lisa said the words that

Speaker 1 shocked me. She said,

Speaker 1 he raped raped you, Eugene.

Speaker 1 She was feeding her kids dinner. She had to leave the room because she didn't want to use the word in front of them.
They didn't know what it meant, but she didn't want to, and

Speaker 1 it was, I couldn't process it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 even though at the time, I thought I'd been killed in that dressing room. I didn't know what had happened.
I thought I died in that dressing room. I had sort of that feeling.

Speaker 1 But Lisa was going to make everything all right. I guess, you know, Lisa was going to make, because we're going to laugh about this.

Speaker 1 And then I'll go to Lane's and I'll, you know, so, no, she says we've got to go to the police. And, oh, well, that was too much.
I said, no.

Speaker 1 She said, come to my house. I'll give you dinner.

Speaker 1 I told her, no, I just wanted to go home. So I did.
So I went home. And I went to work the next day.

Speaker 2 And that was the only conversation you had about pressing charges was when Lisa brought it up. You didn't wake up the next morning and think,

Speaker 1 no, Lisa and I agreed at the end of the phone call, we were never going to speak of this again to anybody. This is it.
It's over.

Speaker 1 This is not to ever be spoken of again. Of course, the next day,

Speaker 1 or possibly the next day, I'm not sure, but I saw Carol Martin. One of my very good friends, she also had a TV show at the same network.
And that was it.

Speaker 1 I just saw Carol and I had to tell her Carol then.

Speaker 1 I had to say, you know, you're not going to believe it. So she said, let's go to my house because she lived 10 minutes away.

Speaker 1 We sat in her kitchen, like you and I are sitting here in my kitchen, and I told her what happened. Well, Carol said, Do not go to the police because he has 200 lawyers and he'll bury you.

Speaker 1 That's what Carol said.

Speaker 1 It was, listen, it's the same today as it was then.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 I could have gone to the police, but I would have lost my job. Roger Ailes would have fired me on the spot.
This is why women don't come forward against a powerful man.

Speaker 1 You lose your job, and he will retaliate.

Speaker 2 How were you doing in those weeks immediately after? Was it still...

Speaker 2 You know, were you still just in shock? Or did you find yourself that you were moving forward in some ways, but other parts of you weren't?

Speaker 1 Well, I thought I was getting along fine.

Speaker 1 No, I was saying I put it I put it behind me.

Speaker 1 I'm not a woman who like dwells.

Speaker 1 So I thought I was doing that.

Speaker 1 So that's what I thought I was doing.

Speaker 1 You know.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 you were never intimate with anyone after that again.

Speaker 1 Well, see, there's that.

Speaker 2 Did it all change for you? I mean, you were moving on, and you were, but in a deeper level, was that

Speaker 2 could you see that that was that was kind of shut down now?

Speaker 1 I didn't see it at the time.

Speaker 1 No, I uh

Speaker 1 anytime an attractive, available man

Speaker 1 would look at me, I couldn't look back at him. I'd turn my eyes down.
I wouldn't smile. I wouldn't do anything.

Speaker 1 Did you try?

Speaker 2 Did you try to go on date?

Speaker 1 Well, the dog would have objected.

Speaker 2 The dog would say, no man's coming in here.

Speaker 2 Did you try, though, to date?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 It's not funny.

Speaker 1 I started to dating sites, if that has anything to do with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you weren't dating, but at the same time, you were...

Speaker 1 I started GreatBoyfriends.com, which are where women recommended their ex-boyfriends to each other.

Speaker 1 So I was psychologically pulling strings behind my own back of getting me out there again, but no.

Speaker 2 I mean, you wrote a book about finding the right guy.

Speaker 1 I did.

Speaker 2 Eugene's book was called Mr. Wright, Right Now, Man-Catching Made Easy.
It was published in 2004.

Speaker 2 Years later, Eugene spoke to a psychologist about what had happened to her. She realized she blamed herself.
When she saw Donald Trump come into Bergdorf Goodman, she thought he was attractive.

Speaker 2 She'd flirted with him. She told the psychologist,

Speaker 2 I can feel the shutdown. It's like when shopkeepers pull down the metal grate to secure the store.
I can feel it when it happens.

Speaker 2 When you're interested in someone, you communicate it in a million little physical ways. And when you like them, you pursue them.
I haven't done that since then. I shut it down.

Speaker 1 You know, it'd be nice for me to call up my fella and say, come over, let's make dinner together. And then we'd watch him neck flicks.
Then we'd make out like crazy. But no, I don't have that.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I lost a lot.

Speaker 2 When you would hear about him,

Speaker 2 Donald Trump and the new, you know, coming up for whatever he was doing

Speaker 2 in those years after,

Speaker 2 what would it do to you when when you would hear his name?

Speaker 1 I got really good at,

Speaker 1 well, luckily, oddly enough, it's sort of exposure therapy with Donald Trump because you see him so much. You either have to learn to deal with it or your life is shattered, right?

Speaker 1 So I learned very quickly to

Speaker 1 bat it away.

Speaker 2 When and why, after all those years, did you decide to come forward and go public with what had happened to you?

Speaker 1 Oh, it was the Weinstein story hitting the front page of the New York Times. I thought, well, my God.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 All right. Let's do it.
Okay. And I thought, I've been silent.
I'm 75. Jesus, Gene, get the fuck over it and come forward.
So that was it.

Speaker 1 Of course, I couldn't really have foreseen all the damage. But

Speaker 1 even at the time, I thought, okay, I'll just pay the price. I got to do it.

Speaker 2 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 once eugene carroll decided to talk about what happened she said she sat down at her kitchen table and wrote everything down in one sitting

Speaker 2 Her story was published as an essay in New York magazine in June 2019.

Speaker 2 Eugene was on the cover, too, photographed wearing the same wool Donna Karen coat dress she remembers wearing that day in 1996.

Speaker 2 She still had it at the back of her closet.

Speaker 1 I was in New York City because when it came out, people thought it'd be best if I'd be in New York. And I...
Why?

Speaker 2 For press or for security?

Speaker 1 We weren't talking about security then. It never occurred to us.

Speaker 1 New York Magazine wanted me available.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I was aware there was a buzz coming on, and I didn't really know anything until I got back to

Speaker 1 the little tiny cheap hotel I was staying at on 10th Avenue, opened up my computer,

Speaker 1 and I just saw a slut, skank, lying bitch, you know. And so then I went to my Ask Eugene email because I always know I will get something nice.

Speaker 1 And there was something nice, you go, girl, and there was something. And then I opened up the third one and

Speaker 1 it was, I stared at it

Speaker 1 and I thought I was going to get hit with a bullet at that minute.

Speaker 1 It was a threat to kill me.

Speaker 1 And I thought when you get a threat to kill you, you look around,

Speaker 1 there was no curtain over the one, and I like ducked because I thought I was going to get shot.

Speaker 1 That's what it's like getting in death because you feel, you read the threat, and you think it's happening.

Speaker 1 And then I got several that night. So my life

Speaker 1 that I used to know was over.

Speaker 1 And the new life began.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump denied Eugene's story. He said that he had never met her, that he didn't know her, even though there was a photo of the two of them together at a party in the 80s.

Speaker 1 And he said, I made it up to sell books, and so that's what happened.

Speaker 2 You knew he would react, though.

Speaker 1 I thought he would say it was consensual.

Speaker 2 Soon after Eugene's story was published, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin both confirmed to the New York Times that Eugene had told them the same story over 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 Lisa said she thought Eugene might have called her first because Lisa had just written a magazine article about Donald Trump. She remembered they fought about what Eugene should do next.

Speaker 2 When Lisa told her to go to the police, she said Eugene said, quote, it was 15 minutes of my life. It's over.
Don't ever tell anybody. I just had to tell you.

Speaker 2 Carol Martin remembered sitting in her kitchen with Eugene, and she remembered that she told her, quote, I wouldn't tell anybody this.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump kept denying anything had happened. He repeated that he didn't know who Eugene was.
And in one interview, he said, quote, she's not my type.

Speaker 2 Do you think if you were 35, he would have said, she's not my type? Was it something about the fact that

Speaker 2 you were 75 and, you know, that...

Speaker 1 Well, of course, everything to do with it because I was on the cover of New York magazine with no makeup. from the artistic point of view it was brilliant

Speaker 1 here she is no makeup she's telling the truth this is a woman

Speaker 1 this is an old so what it was is a shriveled crone on the cover

Speaker 2 after her essay came out eugene was at a party and ran into the lawyer and activist george conway they talked about donald trump's comments about her

Speaker 2 She said it was during that conversation that she realized she could sue Trump for defamation.

Speaker 2 So in November 2019, she did.

Speaker 2 But the case was stalled for years.

Speaker 2 And then, in November 2022, a new law went into effect in New York State called the Adult Survivors Act.

Speaker 2 What is the Adult Survivors Act?

Speaker 1 It is a brilliant idea which

Speaker 1 is now happening in many states across the country where it opens a window

Speaker 1 for victims of sexual assault

Speaker 1 to make a complaint in civil court against their abuser.

Speaker 1 The statute of limitations usually is shut down in most states after five or six or seven years.

Speaker 1 But in New York, they opened it up and we sued him at, I think, two minutes after 12 o'clock on the day it became legal to do it.

Speaker 2 Eugene filed a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump for battery and again for defamation based on more comments he had made about her in 2022.

Speaker 2 He'd repeated that her story was a lie and that she was not his type.

Speaker 2 This time, Eugene didn't have to wait. A trial was scheduled for the spring of 2023.

Speaker 2 She started preparing, and she says her legal team scheduled a mock trial.

Speaker 1 Lawyers like to present their arguments to

Speaker 1 people who could be on a jury to find out how their arguments are working.

Speaker 2 Eugene says they selected three different juries for the mock trial, trying their best to reflect the New York court's jury pool.

Speaker 1 And I did not appear. What they had was tapes from me from my deposition.

Speaker 1 All

Speaker 1 three juries agreed that

Speaker 1 yes, a man and a woman could end up in a dressing room in Bergdorf-Goodman in 1996. And yes, something sexual could have happened in a Bergdorf dressing room in 1996.

Speaker 1 And yes, of course, one of those people was Donald Trump and the other was Eugene Carroll. Yes.
What they didn't agree on was they thought I wanted it because I was so ugly and so old

Speaker 1 that there was no way in hell Donald Trump ever attacked me.

Speaker 2 Eugene was worried that might happen. She said she'd even talked to her lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, about it.

Speaker 1 I had suggested to them, I don't like the way I look, because I was getting constant,

Speaker 1 much of my social media feed concerned how ugly I was.

Speaker 1 So what we did is I had said, let me show you some clips from the old Ask Eugene show from 1996. Let's do my hair like this.
And Robbie said, no, forget it. We'll just show pictures of you.

Speaker 1 We don't need it. Then the mock jury happened.

Speaker 1 First thing Robbie said was, cut your hair.

Speaker 2 So go back to how you looked in 1996.

Speaker 1 So this is the look I had in 1996.

Speaker 1 And then we did the color I did in 96 and the makeup. And I wore clothes exactly that I wore in 1996.

Speaker 2 The trial started in April of 2023.

Speaker 2 On the second day, Eugene was called to the stand, and she told her story to a jury for the first time.

Speaker 2 She told them she flirted with Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 She said, quote, I didn't picture anything about what was about to happen. That open door has plagued me for years because I just walked into it.

Speaker 2 She told them that inside the dressing room, Donald Trump forcibly penetrated her with his fingers and his penis.

Speaker 2 One of Donald Trump's lawyers, Joseph Takapina, cross-examined Eugene for hours.

Speaker 2 He asked repeatedly about the details she couldn't remember clearly, like whether Bergdorf Goodman had a revolving door.

Speaker 2 He spent a lot of time asking her why she didn't scream. She was in a department store, not the middle of nowhere.
Why didn't she cry out for help?

Speaker 2 He brought up the fact that instead she laughed.

Speaker 2 She told him she wished she had screamed, so more people would believe her.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 such an old argument that women have to behave one way and never another. There's the perfect victim.

Speaker 1 She always goes to the police.

Speaker 1 She always screams. She never laughs afterwards.
She never goes to a party. She never smiles.

Speaker 1 She may go to work. I don't know.
But usually she just sits home depressed because she's been attacked. That's the perfect victim.

Speaker 2 How do you not keep your cool in that type of an environment where

Speaker 2 you're being asked these questions and you want to say, fuck you!

Speaker 2 Yeah, how do you, but you know, you can't.

Speaker 1 No, you can't. No, no, no, I kept my cool because I knew at that point Takapina was really getting on my nerves.
Where I lost it was when my own attorney, Mike Ferrara,

Speaker 1 having made it through the day and a half of doing my direct testimony, he asked me, was I glad that I came forward? And that's all it took.

Speaker 1 And I just, that was that the tears like were exploding behind my eyes.

Speaker 1 That's when somebody handled me gently, that was that, that, that was a moment where my anger against Trump just came pouring down my face.

Speaker 2 Eugene was prepared for Donald Trump's lawyers to ask her personal questions.

Speaker 2 In a deposition before the trial, she says another one of his lawyers asked her how many people she'd slept with. She said eight.
Then she was asked to list them.

Speaker 2 The list ended with her second husband, the anchorman John Johnson. She said no one talked to her about the ninth man, Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin both testified during the trial and confirmed Eugene's story.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump never appeared in court, but he gave a tape deposition.

Speaker 2 During the nearly hour-long video played in court, Trump called Eugene a nut job, a whack job, and mentally sick. He denied the story again and said again that she was not his type.

Speaker 2 Well, when the jury went to deliberate,

Speaker 2 how are you feeling? Were you feeling confident?

Speaker 1 When the jury went out, are you insane? No, we had

Speaker 1 six men and three women. No, I was a wreck.

Speaker 2 The jury deliberated for just under three hours.

Speaker 2 They found Donald Trump responsible for sexually abusing Eugene Carroll, but they rejected her claim that he raped her.

Speaker 2 Under New York law at the time, rape was defined as non-consensual vaginal penetration by a penis.

Speaker 2 The jury did not agree that that had happened, but they did believe Donald Trump had forced sexual contact without without Eugene's consent.

Speaker 2 The jury also found him liable for defamation and awarded Eugene $5 million.

Speaker 2 Trump called the verdict a disgrace.

Speaker 2 The next day, during a CNN presidential town hall, he denied the story again. He called the case fake news, and he called Eugene a whack job.

Speaker 1 He did it in front of a huge crowd and made the audience laugh. laugh.
So we sued him again, absolutely.

Speaker 2 Eugene amended her original defamation lawsuit, the one she had filed in 2019, to include his comments from the town hall.

Speaker 2 The trial began in January 2024.

Speaker 2 This time, Donald Trump showed up.

Speaker 2 So what about that in the second trial, the moment that you see him for the first time in the courtroom? What was it like?

Speaker 1 Well, while I was preparing for trial, I lost my ability to speak, so that was a thing.

Speaker 2 Tell me about that.

Speaker 1 I did not want to face him in court. I didn't want to do it.
And

Speaker 1 I kept saying, I'll be fine, I'll be fine. Then we went for a prep session.
I couldn't talk.

Speaker 2 Eugene says in the years since she made her story public, the death threats never stopped. She says she was sent emails with pictures of women who had been violently killed.

Speaker 2 One picture, she remembers, was from a car accident. Another looked like it was taken from a crime scene and the woman had been murdered.

Speaker 2 EGEN's team organized a meeting with a psychologist.

Speaker 1 So I had to talk to Dr. Leslie Lubwitz over the Zoom, and

Speaker 1 I said the problem was I couldn't talk.

Speaker 1 And pretty soon, she says,

Speaker 1 just now you don't have to say anything about it, but just give me an example of a threat that you can't talk about. So before I know it, I'm reading the threat to her,

Speaker 1 and then she solved the problem. I don't have to say how I feel about the threat.
Just tell what's happening in my body. That's all I had to do.
And that's, then I could talk. I can't breathe.

Speaker 1 I could answer. That could be my answer.

Speaker 1 I can't breathe. That's it.
I can't get my breath. My heart is beating too fast.

Speaker 1 And that's what I did.

Speaker 1 The first day,

Speaker 1 the attorneys were

Speaker 1 having a sidebar with Judge Kaplan, and I am sitting at the plaintiff's table, and he is sitting at the defendant's table, which is right behind me. So

Speaker 1 when nobody was there, I turned all the way around in my seat, all the way around, and lanced him in the eye. This is just to give myself courage, okay? Just to give me courage.

Speaker 1 And he jerked and looked back at me. I got his attention.

Speaker 1 And then I held his eye and he held my eye and then I told him what I wanted to tell him.

Speaker 1 And he got it. He got it.

Speaker 2 What did you tell him?

Speaker 1 I'm not telling you. I told him I looked right in his eye and he

Speaker 1 he knew what I was saying to him.

Speaker 1 And then I turned back around.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 after I had forced myself to do that, I was all full of beans, let me tell you, for the rest of the trial. And I looked at him the whole time I was given

Speaker 1 testimony. And he never looked.

Speaker 1 Anytime

Speaker 1 our eyes would cross, he would look away.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 4 What are you hoping for today in the founders? Scrappy, traction-oriented grinders and hustlers who will blow through every brick wall in this building to get to where they need to be?

Speaker 4 Welcome to the pitch season 14, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. On this season of the show, 10 VCs, seven startups with one shot to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, we built the entirely wrong product.

Speaker 4 Two shots to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 1 With that intro, let's go.

Speaker 4 Season 14 is available now wherever you listen to podcasts. So subscribe to the pitch so you don't miss it.
This season is presented by Adobe.

Speaker 2 One day, Donald Trump posted 40 times on Truth Social about Eugene Carroll in less than an hour. He called the case a witch hunt and accused Eugene of changing her story.

Speaker 2 When he testified in court three days later, he was on the stand for less than five minutes.

Speaker 2 He was asked if he stood by his video deposition from the previous trial where he called Eugene a whack job and sick. He answered, quote, 100%.

Speaker 2 Eugene stayed in New York City during the trial.

Speaker 2 One day, the people taking care of her dogs at home told her her they noticed an unfamiliar car driving up and down her street and parking at the end of her driveway.

Speaker 2 When she testified, she told the jury about her first death threat, the night her essay was published in June 2019.

Speaker 2 She said she was so afraid she was about to be shot in her hotel room that she tried to hide and tried to hang her clothes across the windows.

Speaker 2 Before the verdict was announced to the court, E. Jean heard the judge ask the jury four person a question.
She said he asked, quote,

Speaker 2 the M that appears next to various numbers, what does it mean?

Speaker 2 You wanted a kind of a lot of money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 83.3 million.

Speaker 1 But it's more now because I've been getting interest.

Speaker 2 Did you ever imagine it was going to be that much money?

Speaker 1 Look at me.

Speaker 1 Do you see? I don't even like stuff. I don't like stuff.
I don't think about money. I don't imagine money.
I never for a minute thought, oh, I'm going to get a bunch of money. Can you tell?

Speaker 2 We are drinking out of salsa jars.

Speaker 1 I don't care. Oh, I got to go buy some pretty glasses.

Speaker 2 Eugene hasn't gotten any of the money yet. She won't until the appeals process is over.
Trump appealed both verdicts.

Speaker 2 But she said that she plans to donate the money. She has a running list of ideas.
One is to start a fund supporting victims of sexual assault.

Speaker 2 Right after we finished our interview, Eugene gave me a tour of her house. She's lived alone there for years, plus her two dogs.

Speaker 2 She showed me her bedroom, which is right off of the kitchen. In it, there's a twin bed, and next to the bed, there's a shotgun.

Speaker 2 Oh, it really is right next to your bed.

Speaker 1 Well, of course it is.

Speaker 2 Wow, do you practice?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 I mean, I guess you know what you have to do.

Speaker 1 I used to practice with a nice little revolver because that I could handle a high, you know, but this one I don't. This is locked.
This is loaded.

Speaker 1 All I have to do is push off the safety and shoot in the general direction.

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 They can come and shoot me. I don't care.
I'm ready to. I don't care.
Because they're not going to get far.

Speaker 2 I mean, you might not care that they shoot you, but they're still... How do you feel about them coming to shoot you?

Speaker 1 Well, they would be coming

Speaker 1 because of Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 He has an enormous impact on his followers. So when he says, she's a liar, you better keep your wits about you.
That's all.

Speaker 2 In 2023, Donald Trump's lawyers went to court to try to get a retrial against Eugene.

Speaker 2 A judge rejected their motion. And he added a comment about the jury's original verdict.

Speaker 2 Quote, the finding that Miss Carroll failed to prove that she was raped does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump raped her, as many people commonly understand.

Speaker 2 Indeed, as the evidence makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump, in fact, did exactly that.

Speaker 2 In January of 2024, the governor of New York changed the state's law to expand the legal definition of rape and mentioned Eugene's case the day she did it.

Speaker 1 And now the definition of rape includes what Trump did to me in the dressing room. So that is that is we were way behind the times there.
So that's been fixed.

Speaker 2 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 2 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sejiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Speaker 2 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

Speaker 2 We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads.

Speaker 2 Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.

Speaker 2 These are special episodes with me and criminal co-creator, Lauren Spohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately.

Speaker 2 To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

Speaker 2 We're on Facebook at this is criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast.

Speaker 2 Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

Speaker 2 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.