On with Kara Swisher - Making Trump Pay with E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

“Not my type” is what President Donald Trump said about writer and former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman. Despite his denials, in 2023, a jury found Trump liable for assault and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. After he continued to defame her — leading his supporters to launch an avalanche of threats against her — a second jury in 2024 awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages.   Kara talks to Carroll and her lead attorney, civil rights lawyer Roberta Kaplan, about the two civil lawsuits Carroll details in her new memoir, “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.”  They discuss potential evidence left out of the trial, including connections to Jeffrey Epstein, where Trump’s appeals stand, what chance he might have of bringing the cases to the Supreme Court and what impact his attempts to silence lawyers could have on our legal system. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Jean. I don't think we've met. Oh, you two are going to like each other. I can't wait to hear the Adam Becker thing. I plan on being very scared after I hear your podcast. It's on. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guests today are writer, former advice columnist and renowned Donald Trump ass-kicker, E. Jean Carroll and her attorney, the formidable Robbie

Kaplan. They're here to talk about Carroll's new memoir, Not My Type, One Woman vs. a President. As you may remember, not my type is what Donald Trump said about E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the New York City department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. At the time, she was a well-known advice columnist for Elle magazine with her own TV show, Ask E. Jean, and had written a couple of books, including a biography of Hunter S. Thompson. She was something of a gonzo journalist herself. Carroll told two friends, but otherwise she didn't talk about what happened in that dressing room

until 2019. Then she hooked up with legendary attorney Kaplan, a legal powerhouse who defended US versus Windsor, the Supreme Court case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, and won a $26 million verdict against the violent neo-Nazis from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Together they took on Trump and in 2023 a jury found him liable for having sexually abused Carol and for defaming her. To be clear, not my type was not even close to the worst thing he'd said. The jurors awarded her $5 million. And then Trump kept joking about it and calling her names. And she got death threats from his acolytes. So she sued him again and won again. In 2024, a different jury awarded her $83.3 million in damages.

I want to talk to Carolyn Kaplan about the trials and tribulations in Carol's memoir. I really thought it was a really interesting book. She's very honest about herself and her mistakes. And at the same time, she's gone through a harrowing process that has resulted in victory. And she's surprisingly, I guess, I don't know, funny, entertaining about what's happened. I also want to hear about how they've been standing up

to Trump's appeals and what their plans are if the cases go to the Supreme Court. Yes, folks, this could go to the Supreme Court. Our expert question today comes from writer Lisa Birnbach, author of the 1980s classic, The Official Preppy Handbook. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. Blockchain is reshaping every aspect of society, starting with finance.

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From the zesty Chipotle Ranch to the decadent cheesy melts, we'd call them rich, but they're just five bucks. New $5 steak burritos, only at Taco Bell. So E. Jean and Robbie, thanks for coming on on for a conflab. E. Jean, you use that word conflab a lot and ask E. Jean, you call your readers conflabians. Yes. What makes for a good conflab and can we have one about President Donald Trump, a hideous man as you've called him?

Well, this today is a marvelous conflab because it contains wit, it contains women of various opinions, it contains people who are smart and want everybody to get off their lazy asses and do something about what's happening right now in the country. Why conflab? What does conflab come from? I don't know. Confab, of course, is the correct word. Con-flab, because if people are going to fat shame, we are going to control that word and we're going to turn it into something wonderful.

Con-flab. Boom. Okay. All right, Robbie. Are you ready for a flab? I'm totally. She's been my client now for years, so I'm completely ready for it. All right.

So let's start. Let's start. Talk about your new memoir, not my type. Very funny, surprisingly funny. I didn't think I'd laugh so much about something so terrible. It's about you preparing for and then sitting through two trials against Donald Trump, one for sexual abuse and defamation, the other for defamations that have led you to being threatened, harassed, etc.

Pretty heavy stuff. But you've described it as high comedy. And again, the book is funny. I think it's because of you. You've been a funny writer. I've followed you for many years. So talk a little bit about laugh even when you want to cry, rah rah cheerleader writing style. Where do you think that comes from and why did you do it this way? Kara, I had court transcripts, court transcripts. So when people read the book and they say that's so absurd, that's so funny, what it was, it's real.

It's what actually happened. You've been inside of many courtrooms. You understand? There is no normal conversation going on. It's all heightened conversation and dramatic and the presentations people are trying to persuade one another. I was surrounded with a group of characters straight out of Jonathan Swift. I mean, it was, as a journalist, at the end of every night trial, I go back and I would put notes into my phone.

I was flabbergasted. Thank God I got those details done. And it just turned out to be funny. Except you're the main character, you know, and usually when you're a journalist, you're watching other people. You're not the person in the scene itself. No. This time it was all about a tragic attack.

And all the characters that I found so funny were surrounding to either argue that this attack happened or this attack is a totally made-up thing because I'm a gold digger. I'm a gold digger, I'm a slut, I'm out to help the Democrats get elected, I'm a dangerous woman. And Robbie's role was to convince the jury I was none of those things. So it was an interesting situation and watching Robby take hold of the lectern to address the jury was like watching Alexander the Great land in Persia. Oh wow.

That woman. Have you ever heard Robby argue in court? Brilliant. Fact after fact after fact after fact. She is a sensation. And just this tiny woman and she drove Donald Trump so insane, Kara, that in her final argument in the trial when Trump was sitting listening, final argument, he stood up turning vermilion with like steam coming out his nostrils and his ears, like his hair had swelled twice its size because of the fire in his brain and walked out of court.

And it was so sad because that's what a guilty man does. Guilty man stands up and runs out of court, right? If you haven't done it, you sit there and you say, this is ridiculous. If you're guilty, you just turn tail. And of course, we won the minute he stood up and walked out. Right. So, Robbie, we talked about this when you came on in 2024. How did you look at it? Because there is a comic element to this tragedy, obviously, and then there's gallows humor. When you're in court like that, the ridiculousness of it is so apparent, right? And at the same time, it's dead serious. Talk a little bit about how you handled that, Robbie. So, you know, that is true in almost every case. It's obviously was much more dramatically true here.

And in a lot of ways, a case or certainly a trial is like a play. You see in all this, in a lot of the litigation versus the Trump administration right now, everyone knows, including the judge and the lawyers, what's really going on. But because of these time-warning and frankly effective rules of how to present evidence in court and how to make arguments and decorum and all those things, there's always two levels going on. And it's very important. I think E. Jean and I make a pretty good mutton Jeff that way or Abbot and Costello, whoever

you want to say, because E. Jean, my strategy with my strategy with my teammates was you guys, we just have to let E. Jean be E. Jean. We're not turning E. Jean into a yes, no witness. That's not who she is. She won't be believable if she tries to do that. And she is who she is. And I think the jury clearly, certainly the judge, and I think also the jury was charmed as 99.9% of the population

are when they meet Eugene. So that was Eugene. And then I was there kind of being the straight guy, for lack of a better term, and kind of just making the arguments as simply as I could and applying legal principles. And you have this guy getting up like a teenager, really. I mean, my son, who's 19, is more mature than that, getting up and storming out. And when that happened, I remember thinking to myself, okay, you just lost another $10 million. That was my thought process as I was continuing to give my closing argument. Explain as a lawyer.

It was so contemptuous of the court and the judge's authority and so disrespectful to me, that the jury, which had already spent days listening to the horrendous threats EGene receives almost every day, which I had categorized by type of violence. So I think we started with rape, is that right, E? And then we went to strangling, and then we went to shooting, and then we went to disemboweling. I mean, literally there were so many in each category. It was the best way to organize it. I'll give you another example.

When we were in the jury selection process, Judge Kaplan asked everyone in the room, all the potential jurors, I guess there were probably 100 of them in the room that day. And he said, if anyone believes that the election of 2020 was rigged, please raise your hand. No one, none of the 100 potential jurors raised their hand,

but Donald Trump did. He sat there in the middle like that. So it was incredibly, the irony in the sense of comedy in this particular case was very, very strong. So E.G., I want to play you this section of your book where you describe how you started pitching stories to magazines when you were 12 and didn't get your first story except until you were 37. Here it is. Can you imagine the relentless, insane, glorious, hot, blistering, beat yourself up, plow ahead, never say die enthusiasm that drives a woman to go on and on and on through a blizzard, a blunt editor's numbing nose for 25 years?

That's really funny. I had the same thing. I actually saved the letters of all the rejections I got from newspapers. And at one point, I did, you know, they were always on that onion skin paper, but I'm that old. And one editor came up to me, he said, you're the kind of people we should have hired when you were young, you're the kind of person,

I go, I have an email from, I mean, not an email, I have a letter from you and I pulled it out, like, here you go, you rejected me and quite rudely. I love it. But that's fine. And he's like, I'm an idiot. And I go, you're an idiot, but that's okay. But you say that it's a never stop attitude that leads you to say yes to shopping I love it. But that's fine. And he's like, I'm an idiot. And I go, you're an idiot. But that's okay.

But you say that it's a never stop attitude that leads you to say yes to shopping with Donald Trump and Bergdorf Goodman in 1996, despite a number of bad experiences with hideous men throughout your life. Looking back, talk about that. Were you naive or did you think a calculated risk that went sour? I mean, you've done a lot of crazy things. You took drugs with Hunter S. Thompson, for example, and that to me is like a pretty risky thing to do. But talk maybe less risky than this. Talk a little bit about that attitude that you had then and maybe even now.

Well, Kara, as you know, the great moment in your life is getting on an airplane, snapping that seatbelt across your lap, flying off to go do a story about somebody you've never met in a place you've never been. Yep. That is exciting. You're after the story, after the story. There was no way in hell I was not going to go shopping with Donald Trump when he said, hey, you're that advice lady, come help me buy a gift.

I just thought I died and went to heaven. This is my purpose in life, to help people, to advise them. And Donald Trump at the time was not like the Donald Trump of today. He was the man about town. Yes, he was a hustler. Yes, but it looked like a lark to me. Also, it reminded me of a sketch I had written on Saturday Night Live. There was no way in hell. And also, we were having

– I was flirting my brains out with him, correct. He was being very funny, it was joshing, it was witty, and then it just turned dark. Laura Miller at Slate said, this is exactly what Donald Trump did to the country. We all laughed at him. We all said he was a clown. We all said he was absolutely an empty suit and laughed our asses off. And then boom, it turned dark. It's interesting. So I'm not the only one, you know?

No, no, no. A lot of, I think there's not a woman who hasn't had that experience with a person, right? Everybody has a version of that somewhere. People don't realize how much of a surprise it is actually. Even I have been surprised. You don't see it coming, right, kind of thing in a lot of ways. So Robbie, you came on the show in February 2024, shortly after you won the second defamation trial and the jury awarded E. Jean 83.3 million in damages.

You said that you wanted to let E. Jean be herself, but you had to make sure the jury awarded Ejean 83.3 million in damages. You said that you wanted to let Ejean be herself, but you had to make sure the jury didn't believe Trump when he said that she was not his type. Talk about how your team prepared Ejean for the trial, including hair and outfits, because you, you know, and Ejean, you said you needed to seem fuckable, right? I mean, that's what you yourself said.

Gotta be fuckable or the jury will not believe me because Robbie ran a mock trial beforehand and all the jurors agreed that we were, yes, two people could be in a Bergdorf dressing room. Yes, two people could be in the dressing room, something sexual would happen. And yes, Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll were the two people in the dressing room. But E. Jean Carroll was too much of a disaccaded crone to believe anything but that I was begging him for it.

So Robbie has a plan. Okay, Robbie, let's hear about that. So I think we did two things in prop one, kind of a surface level and one more serious. At the surface level, you're hearing how E. Jean speaks. She signs a lot of her emails ravishing regards. It was very important to me while I didn't want to cage her in any way. I wanted E. Jean to be able to be E. Jean. I didn't want her, I think the rule I set is no words greater than three syllables. Right. Okay.

I was worried that she would speak in a language that the jury, some of the jury might understand, but some might not, and that would be off-putting to the jurors. That just took, frankly, just a lot of prep sessions where we would go through it with her over and over again, and by the end, she was actually phenomenal at it. I knew in cross, she would be be great because when Joe Tecapina or then Alina Haber-Crosster, that's when she was really in her element. And it's often easier to answer questions with a hostile questionnaire than it is to kind of tell your story, especially this kind of story on Direct. The more fundamental issue, which also came out of the mock jury exercises, was that E. Jean, as you can again tell, has

a very hard time, understandably so given her history and her background, of admitting any weakness. And so she had a very hard time even saying how what Donald Trump had done to her had irreparably damaged her life. Just so there's no mystery about that, E. Jean was never able to date again after that happened, and there are psychological reasons that explain that. But she had a very hard time coming to terms with that. And so on that we did a couple of things. One, probably the smartest thing we did, is we hired this phenomenal expert witness, psychologist out of California, who was one of the people who

developed trauma theory back when they were using it with Vietnam veterans and really knows this area really well. And she spent how many hours with you, Lee? 26 hours, locked in a room. I'd never been to a therapist. Can you imagine the hideousness? I can't. I've never been to one myself, but go ahead. Kara, trust me, don't do it. Really. I won't. Don't worry. Not happening. Well, I learned after the end of 26 hours, my stomach was killing me because I learned that I had given up everything erotic and romantic in my life just because of this attack. She put

everything together for me and it made me sick to my stomach. It made me sick. So you did that in order to what? Because during the jury exercises, particularly the women jurors, really did not like when E. Jean said or suggested in any way that she was not a victim. Right. Not only did they not like it, they hated it. And the reason is, is because I assume some of them had prior incidents themselves, and certainly all of them knew other women who'd experienced this. So it was very important that E. Jean not only say it, but say it in a way that was believable and in order to do that, she had to believe it. So a lot of shrink time with a phenomenal, phenomenal psychologist, Leslie Leibowitz

got us that. Then as we were preparing for the second trial, remember the first trial, Donald Trump didn't show up. The second trial, we all believed he would show up and we knew that it would be the first time that he would see him since 1996, since the spring of 1996 when this happened. And as we were doing kind of prepping the outline and going through the questioning, it was about two days before, it was the weekend as I recall, E, E-Jean lost the ability to speak, which again, for E-Jean is quite dramatic because she's phenomenal at speaking and she

literally couldn't answer the question. She had a hard time coming up with words and forming sentences. So I had already suggested that maybe the psychologist should be there for the second trial. E. Jean thoroughly rejected that suggestion on my part. But when we had the session where she was having a really hard time speaking, I said, look, I really think you need to talk to the psychologist again. And she did. And

they came up with a strategy for how she would confront Donald Trump when she saw him. The issue of how to be a victim is very hard for women, right? Because there's downsides to both parts. If you're too strong, it's a problem. If you're too weak, it's a problem, correct? Exactly. And here's this woman who lived her life, years submitting stories goes to live, believe it or not, with Hunter S. Thompson and Aspen. She was fearless. And so she had a very hard time, I probably would too, of acknowledging the really fundamental damage that this incident had done to her. Also I was worried that with the women on the jury, I didn't know what they'd been

through and just complain that some man jammed his fingers and you may be nothing compared to the trauma they had. So it was, I never want to say I'm feeling bad because I don't want anybody else to feel bad when they hear that I'm feeling bad. It was hard. It's very Indiana. It's very Midwestern Indiana. The book is a pastiche of memory, stories from your past, court records, and mixed in are side notes with descriptions and inner monologue. Now some of them do pack an emotional punch, like in the middle of the transcript of your cross-examination by Trump's attorney, Joe Takapina, who's grilling you about why you

didn't scream during the attack. You write, it's a surreal feeling being beat up by a man who is asking me to describe being beat up and assaulted by a man he is beating me up to defend. I think it's the fear many abuse survivors have about going to court. Talk about that moment in court. Well, there's a perfect victim, Kara, perfect victim. Never is silent, always screams, always goes to the police, always reports to the police. No matter if the guy attacks her after she goes to the police, no matter if he tears apart her reputation, perfect victim always goes to the police.

And here's the thing, perfect victim just goes back to her cave and covers herself with a dishcloth, never smiles again, never goes to a party, never laughs, never does anything. But mainly she screams. And Joe Takapina, straight out of the 16th century, could not believe that I didn't scream. What I had done was I had laughed. And boy, did he make a big deal out of that. Just, I mean, Robbie had arguments against it. She laughed. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, she laughed. Of course I laughed because of course in an erotic situation what you do is you laugh at a man

to, you know, it sort of calms things down. But being questioned about it, it just pissed me off because he was trying to knock me down, just trying to knock me down. So, man. Which is his job, to be fair, this is his job to do so. No, he's an excellent defense attorney. Let me tell you, Joe Tocquepino is one of the best. But the thing where I did break down on the stand was our own great attorney, Mark Ferrara, asked me this question. Are you sorry that you've gone to trial, E. Jean?

And that did it. Hot blazing tears behind my eyes. That's when you cried. It was. Why? Because I just hated Donald Trump so much and they just came gushing down my face. We'll be back in a minute. Blockchain is reshaping every aspect of society, starting with finance. It's happening across industries, across sectors, and across the world.

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slash cara. That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash cara. There are three chapters in the book about evidence you did not or could not introduce, including evidence related to Jeffrey Epstein, who obviously has been in the news a lot recently. Robbie, explain why you didn't want to introduce it as evidence. And what do you both think about Trump and AG Pam Bondi saying there's no Epstein list? Let's start with you, Robbie, and then E. Jean. I mean, the main reason is I don't think Judge Kaplan would ever have let it in. And we need, you know, one of the most

important things when you're a court is having credibility with the court and not making arguments that he's going to be disdainful of. So I just thought under the rules of evidence that there's no way he would let that in and I didn't even try. There was other stuff that I did try that he didn't let in. For example, Trump wrote a book, and one of his books he wrote, he suggested going to Bordorff Goodman to buy gifts, and he had denied that he had wanted to go to Bordorff Goodman. And the judge wouldn't even let that in. And the argument was, well, Tecapina said, well, he didn't write it.

And we were like, what do you mean? The copyright's in his name. What do you mean he didn't write it? But I think Judge Kaplan was thinking at that point, you know, we had what we had and he wasn't going to add anything into the case. Carol, Robbie's not telling you something. Oh, okay. All right.

When the Epstein stuff came in, it was in Michael Wolfe's book and he had a tape recording. He had hundreds of hours of Jeffrey Epstein on tape. Robbie's so calm here. At the time she was... Jeffrey Epstein. In 1996, shortly after the attack in Burgdorf, running into Trump on the street and Trump, quote, regaling him with the, quote, Torah details of what happened in Burgdorf, Robbie was dying to get this into court. But... All right. Talk about that, Robbie. Yeah.

I mean, it would have been great evidence, but under the rules of evidence, I couldn't get it in. It was hearsay. Yeah. He was dead. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily all that reliable. I mean, there are all these strict rules of evidence, which is why we won the case in

the first place, because these rules generally are good, but they limit the kinds of evidence that may not be as reliable as other kinds of evidence. I just knew I had no chance in hell with Judge Kaplan on that. So first you, Robbie, what did you think of what's happening right now and then Eugene? Look, you know, what's always been most astounding to me

about Jeffrey Epstein is that it happened in plain sight. Right? He wasn't hiding in some upstate cabin somewhere where he was doing this. He was in a townhouse. In the middle of Manhattan. In the upper East side of Manhattan that people would come to all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I don't know whether you call it a client list. I doubt he even called it

a client list. But there's no question that there were a number of other people. He wasn't the only person engaged in the kind of misconduct he was engaged in with women. That wouldn't have made any sense. I mean, I just would be shocked if that were true. And so, look, I don't know what's going on and I don't know who's on the list and who's not on the list. But it was obviously a grave miscalculation on the president's part to kind of trumpet

this all these years and then become president and need to squash it. Right, right, absolutely. He trained them up in QAnon and now he's saying, please don't behave the way I've trained you, which is interesting. What about you, E. Jean? How do you look at it? Well, I interviewed Jill Hartz in Vanity Fair, and she was running a beauty contest back

in the day in the 90s, actually. And she was in Mar-a-Lago, and she's got all her beauty contestants there. She brings Jeffrey Epstein. He brings, Trump brings his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein, with him to meet all these beauty contestants. They lived, I don't know why people don't talk about this, back in the day, very close to each other in Florida, very close. Jill sort of led me to believe walking distance, I don't know if that makes sense, but maybe to a New Yorker it does. But there's Trump running over

with Jeffrey Epstein to meet the girls. Ignorant had not been around money or even out of their home states at the time. I mean, total prey. Horrible. You know, horrible. One of Epson's selling points, as I understand it, to people was that he was really good at saving people on taxes. Yes, that was one of his... Right, saving taxes.

So, I can't imagine that that wasn't attractive to Donald Trump. Yes, probably more attractive. That's probably the most attractive thing. It's interesting. At the time, I think a lot of people did know what was happening, especially after the Florida settlement. I had been invited to his house for one of those dinners. You remember he invited well-known people and he was particularly fixated on tech.

And the person, his representative said, oh, Jeffrey would really like you to come. And I said, I don't dine with pedophiles. What? I'm sorry. What? Bravo. Yeah. And they were like, well, it was, you know, I was like, I just, no, it's not happening in this life or the next. Wow. Love it. Which was interesting, because a lot of people did, a lot of journalists did, that's for

sure. So let's go back to the trials really quickly. The juries came back quickly. How surprising was that? Both of you, talk about the moment the $83 million verdict came down. Robbie, you first on why it came back so quickly and then E. Jean. So both of them came back very quickly. It was under three hours for both, which is shockingly fast for almost any case. The first case, we had a much tougher jury. We had this guy who's a Tim Pool, who got all his news from Tim Pool's podcast, and we couldn't get off the jury.

It had to be unanimous, so he had to vote with us. So I thought that was going to take longer. And the second jury was more, there were people from New York City, so I thought it was a more sympathetic jury. But I was actually, I mean, two things. One, I thought they were going to issue a period of damages that were going to be hefty. I wasn't expecting, honestly, the number as high as we got, which is really only 3.6 times the compensatory, so it's well within constitutional limits.

But I was surprised by that. And I think the reason for it was Donald Trump's own behavior in the courtroom. It's a really bad idea if you're fighting a period of damages claim to act like your contemptuous of the court in the courtroom. And they saw that every day. He would come in in the morning, he'd sit through court, make lots of nasty comments, make huffing and puffing and derisive comments. And then he'd leave and he'd go to, I think it was Trump

Tower, somewhere downtown, and they would do a press conference that he would videotape and which he continued to defame Eugene. So imagine what a case this was for us. I got to say to the jury, not only do you need to give enough money to make him stop, he continued to do it through this very trial and we showed all the videos. So in retrospect, that all makes sense. Ege, what about you? Were you surprised by the speed and also the money? When the jury goes out, we had a Manhattan jury for the second trial.

We had an upstate jury for the first trial that came from Trump counties. That we won the first trial was a real achievement because that was not Manhattan. Those were upstate red counties. This jury, she stands up, the judge says, do you have a verdict? The poor woman stands up. She says, we do, Your Honor. She says, hand it to Andy the clerk. Andy the clerk opens it, starts to read it, cocks his head, frowns, goes like this, hands it up to the judge. Judge Kaplan looks at it, starts to read it, cocks his head, frowns, goes like this, hands it up to the judge. Judge Kaplan looks at it, his eyebrows rise, and he says, Madam Forewoman, what does the M mean? And just, Robbie was on this side of me, we were holding hands, and Sean

G. Crowley was on this side, we floated up to the ceiling. Because I'm going to be giving away that $83.3 million to everything Donald Trump hates. Once you get it. We'll get to that in a second. I think you'll see. Oh, Robbie's going to get it. We're going to get it. No, we're going to get it.

Totally. So first, before that, every week we get to a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, it's Lisa Birnbach of the Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep. I've met Donald Trump and I have this question for you all. Why do American women vote for him? Why did they support him? He is a bully. He has only contempt for him. Why did they support him? He is a bully. He has only contempt for women.

He claims he can grab us whenever he wants, wherever he wants. And yet women, not all women, find him charming, amusing. He tells it like it is. But yet, he votes against all of our interests and has taken away so many of our rights. So what's in it? For transparency, Lisa is one of two people, E. Jean, told about the assault right after it happened in 1996. She testified on E. Jean's behalf. But to her point, were you surprised that Trump won the 2024 election?

First you, E. Jean, and then you, Robbie. Yes, I was surprised and not surprised. It's just that they don't know it. They don't live in a Berlin wall. On this side is all the liberals, on this side is the conservatives. They didn't hear the news. They just didn't hear it. Their Facebook feeds don't give them that kind of information. After he was voted president, the news that he lost in the United States Court of Appeals

to Robbie on his trying to overturn the verdict, that was the first time many people in this country heard he had been found liable for sexual abuse, only when Robbie beat him in the appeals court. So it's not really women's fault. They just didn't know it in the number of People that we needed to know it. What about you Robbie? I Agree, and I think it's due to a lot of other factors that are somewhat unrelated one and I know you focus on this care the rise of factors that are somewhat unrelated. One, and I know you focus on this, Kara, the rise of disinformation and misinformation on the internet. I mean, people were probably getting access to Alina Haba's videos, but not to any real news about what had happened at the case.

Two, there's obviously this incredible resentment, obviously, in our society of certain very large segments now, and that Donald Trump appeals to that because Donald Trump himself is very resentful. And he can channel that in ways that- So the grievance industrial conflict. Yeah, in ways that no one has been able to do. One of the things that's interesting is, you know, he is funny. Like you just said at the beginning, I watched all the apprentices, I was like, he's very

good at social media and to pretend he's not is kind of silly on our part. And I was saying, this is not an excuse, it's an explanation. I'm explaining it. And I have to tell you the one thing that really, it didn't surprise me, but much on the left was like, how dare you say that? I'm like, it's factual. The man is really good at social media. And if you pretend he's not, you know, he's loathsome, he's not good. I'm like, no, he's good. He's also loathsome. It's very hard for people to do that. And so I do think a lot of people miss that, especially with women, because he

has an appeal that is hard to understand and yet is obvious to me, at least. You were trying to take him that day at Bergdorf until you got to the dressing room and he pounced, right? No, he said, look, I'm going to say something that's going to cause fire to be lit across the Kara Swisher universe. But to me, he's one of the great geniuses of the 21st century. Not only is the country falling, people all around the globe. He has set off a firestorm around the globe.

This conservative backlash, women in this country, half of us, have been put 50 years behind. This is Donald Trump. He is smarter than any of us give him credit for. And we got to do what Karen just said. We got to realize he is a genius at social media. And he only thinks of himself, and therefore everybody around him only think of him. And that is what we're dealing with. And all the great demagogues have been good, whether it from Hitler to Huey Long to everybody else. And whether you like them or not doesn't matter.

It does matter, but it doesn't matter. So it's not over yet. Obviously Trump appealed both cases, but you've had new wins in recent weeks, including the court blocking Trump's attempts to get the Department of Justice involved in the case because he's now president. For the third time, so you understand. They're trying to wear you down, presumably. But can you explain to where things stand in the appeals process? Where is the money now?

And the $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict, the only option Trump has left is to take the case to the Supreme Court. In 2024, you told me you didn't think he had any federal issues that the Supreme Court could legitimately take it, but his new claim is that he has presidential immunity. When he made those defamatory comments about E. Jean, you've won a case before the Supreme Court, US versus Windsor, which was a landmark gay marriage case. You may be arguing that again soon. But it was a different court at a different time.

So talk about where we are from a legal point of view with this claim. So on the first verdict, which is kind of the cornerstone of everything, because that's the underlying sexual abuse verdict, the money, Trump, believe it or not, I've never seen anyone do this before, but they deposited the $5 million plus with the court. And I've been doing commercial litigation in the Southern District for eons at this point and I've never seen a defendant just deposit the money with the court. I've been doing commercial litigation in the Southern District for eons at this point and I've never seen a defendant just deposit the money with the court. I don't know what the reason was. I don't know why they didn't just take out a bond, which is what he did for the bigger verdict, but they didn't. So you're right. That case, they told

us they're going to try to take to the Supreme Court. The main issue, there's no issue really of presidential immunity there because when he made that statement, he wasn't president. And obviously when he assaulted Eugene, he wasn't president. Their main argument at the second circuit, and I think they'll try it at SCOTUS, is this argument that we admitted the testimony of Jessica Leeds, who was on a plane in 1979 when Trump, she got bumped up to first class. It's the same pattern. They were making polite chit chat and then all of a sudden he kind of pounced. The other Natasha Stoyanoff, who was a People magazine reporter who came to Mar-a-Lago right

before Barron was born, as I recall. So that would be probably 2005, I think, or late oh five. And she also, he brought her into a room and kind of did the whole pouncing thing with her. And their main argument was kind of ridiculous. Their main argument was really about Jessica Leeds. And it was this argument that because she was on a plane and you didn't know what state they were flying over when this happened, that it wasn't necessarily a federal crime,

then you couldn't admit it under the rule of evidence that allows prior bad acts to come in when it's a case of sexual assault. In most circumstances, they don't come in. The problem with that argument is, and I said in my argument at the court, is it was too many lawyers trying to screw in a light bulb because it was a crime in 1979 to do what Donald Trump did to Jessica Leeds. It was just a different crime. Even if the Supreme Court thought there was any doubt there, it's not what's called a SCOTUS-worthy issue.

It just isn't. There's no split between the circuits. There's no big deal. And we have so much other evidence that came in as the court concluded it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. The big verdict- The 83 million? Is in a different position. So there, we have argued it, they raised two issues. They raised this Westfall Act claim, which is how they got the case to federal court at the very

beginning. And he's now trying to reassert that for the third time. And they raised the underlying claim of presidential immunity. They're related claims, but they're under separate legal doctrines. That I argued before the circuit three weeks ago. And she killed. It was like King Henry at Agincourt. It was unbelievable. Really.

I thought I was Alexander the Great. What happened to Alexander the Great? Now you're king. Now you're the king in Asher Cork. I think that argument went well. As you noted, they've already rejected the Westfall Act argument because that they made in a different route to the Second Circuit. I think they're going to reject the presidential immunity argument because he waived it in

this case. At the very beginning of the case when we were still in state court, the other side submitted a letter that literally said to the state court judge, no one is seeking to escape accountability here. E. Jean can pursue her claims when he is no longer president. If that's not a waiver of presidential immunity, I'm not sure what is. So if it gets to the Supreme Court, do you think it has a chance of getting there? This is a different court, a different time. I think it certainly has a better chance than the $5 million, which I think

has very low chances. On the second claim, I think if you're the justices, you have to be thinking to yourselves, is this really the factual scenario where we want to deal with presidential immunity? Yeah. Right. And my guess is most of them, for most of them, the answer to the question will be no. We'll be back in a minute. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats.

What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no. But a banana? That's a yes. A nice tan? Sorry, nope. But a box fan? Happily yes. A day of sunshine? No.

A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. It's today explained what's going on, my boys and in some cases, gals.

Recently, one of you emailed us with this request. You've got mail. Hello, I'm an avid listener and I strongly believe you should cover the story of Curtis Yarvin. It's important to explore who he is and how he has influenced the MAGA and the Tech Bros movement.

Curtis Yarvin is a very online far-right philosopher whose ideas include the fascinating, the esoteric, the absurd, the racist, and so on. Six months into the Trump administration, there's evidence that he is influencing the MAGA movement and even President Trump. JD Vance knows him and likes him. Elon consulted him about this third-party idea. Yarvin can take some credit for inspiring Doge and, as you'll hear ahead, one of Trump's most controversial, doesn't even begin to cover it, ideas may have come from Yarvin or someone who reads his sub stack. I can almost guarantee you that Trump does not. Everything's computer. Today Explained, weekday afternoons.

So, Robbie, President Trump separately has been targeting big law firms. You have a new law firm, but many of them have struck deals with Trump administration to avoid being penalized. So far, at least nine firms have promised pro bono work for Trump support initiatives, totaling one billion. Many lawyers are leaving those firms. You have a new hire who's done that. It's turned out a lot of these things have turned sour for the firms who had acquiesced. What happens here, including potential Trump opponents like yourselves? So let me say, first of all, that the first firm that did the deal with Trump was Paul Weiss, and that was the firm where I learned to be a lawyer. And then I was there for over 20 years. She made partner before she was 30 at Paul Weiss.

I paid Jen to be my press agent. I'm glad I'm here for this interview so I can instruct people what a brilliant mind you were at 29, 28. And so there were certainly tears in the culture. It wasn't perfect, but a lot of us, certainly my generation and up at Paul Weiss, really believed in the culture and the principles that the firm had. And so this quote unquote deal that the firm did with him is just devastatingly painful to so many of us.

Paul Weiss was known for its litigation practice. That's what people came to Paul Weiss for. That's what I did. That's the kind of work they did and for their dedication to pro bono and public interest work. It's not clear to me today that if a law firm has a big private equity M&A hedge fund practice, that that practice is necessarily compatible with having a truly independent litigation department. And so kind of the movement of big firm lawyers to smaller firms has been happening now for years.

It's like in media. Exactly. And I think this is only going to make it more pronounced. Because you can't have, it's not even just having technical conflicts. You can't really be a litigator if you have to worry that what you say or do in a case involving a completely different client is going

to irk one of your private equity guys. You just can't do it. Yeah, you look at something like Abbie Lowell who defended Jared and Ivanka, or Jared. And then you look at, and he Lowell who defended Jared and Ivanka or Jared, and then you look at, and he's done Hunter Biden, right? He should be able to do whoever he wants. So speaking of people who have been helpful, E. Jean, LinkedIn co-founder, he's founded a lot of things, Reid Hoffman helped finance your case, someone I know very well.

It might have played out differently if you hadn't had that option. One are you worried that Trump will use that promo money to go after you again? And what is the prospects of that happening again given the shift of tech? Now not Reid by any means, and I think he's probably doubled down on his beliefs in many ways. How do you think about that money and the kindness of billionaires? In this case, it benefited you, but most of the billionaires have gone to Trump's side, in tech at least. Reid Hoffman is a hero. He not only helped our case, he called Robbie because he wanted

to help with the Charlottesville case, when, you know, Robbie trounced the Nazis, the white supremacists, the proud boys, she took them all down. Reid Hoffman made that possible. Then there was a little bit of money left over and Reid called Robbie and said, how about using that for the E. Jean Carroll case? So he's, listen, you don't get better than Reid Hoffman. He is fighting the billionaires who are, well, I don't need to tell you. Would you be worried about getting that now?

Because a lot of them are acquiescent at this point. Well, we're not actually that much. You know, oddly I'm not. Oddly, I think we're going to get that 83.3 million and I think we're going to give it away, first of all, to help women get our rights back. Because Robbie and I have enough money, you know, we don't need more stuff. But the country is hurting right now that he's torn it apart. Democracy is hanging by a thread.

And I am not worried about getting the money. I think it's going to take a while though. It's definitely going to take a while. Yeah, it's definitely going to take a while. He'll do everything possible to slow you down. So and has done that. So you're also going up against Trump with the MTA congestion pricing, and you had the Elon lawsuits.

You have a lot of- CCDH, yeah. You're sort of the, I would say the go-to Trump gladiator or whatever. Talk a little bit about that because it's a slightly dangerous role, including with tech people like Elon, although now they're on opposite sides, inevitably. Interesting. Talk a little bit about that and the difficulty. I think about it all the time, right, when I'm saying things, but litigation's a little

different. You're causing them financial and other harms that they consider harmful. You know, it's something that I think is on my wife's mind for understandable reasons all the time. In order to do what I do, I'm very good at repression. And so I can't tell you that I like wake up or, you know, think in the middle of the night that I'm afraid this is who I am and what I do. And if people like me don't fight back, if lawyers who know how to use the court system

and who have judges' respect don't fight back, then who will? What are you afraid of actually? It's not Trump or Elon so much, it's all the people who follow them and, you know, like that poor Will Stancil who was attacked, you know, based on Iraq. That's the people you have to worry about, kind of the nut jobs who actually believe all this QAnon craziness. Well, they're fighting with each other right now. So the ball is, the eye is off you, but do you imagine it returning once the money gets it?

Because he will have a fit. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do think that he is not attacking E. Jean or myself right now, because he's very worried about how that will be perceived by the justices of the Supreme Court. I think that's absolutely correct. E. Jean, you're also a fighter. We've talked a little bit about your threats, the threat level you get. Talk about that and how your life has changed.

Do you ever believe there will be a moment to move on? You know, Robbie had talked about sort of a moment where everything stopped for you. Oh, listen, I don't care if they shoot me. I don't care. I'd like to get shot in the arm. I'd like to get shot. I don't want to be shot in the head and dead. I don't care.

I do not care. I want everybody in the country to get off their I don't want to be shot in the head and dead. I don't care. I do not care. I want everybody in the country to get off their lazy asses and walk outside, look at their neighbors. That's what I'd like people to do. We're living in...it's stupid to be afraid. Why live your life that way? I've been here 81 years. I'm not going to waste the last of it worrying about that guy in marmalade colored makeup.

It makes no sense. So that's what I'm going to do. That's what you're going to do. And when this money gets to you, is there anything you're going to do for yourself? I got it. Look, you can see I got all my stuff. I don't need anything. I don't like stuff.

You know what? It occurred to me, Kara, okay, shh, we won't tell anybody. I was thinking of getting a facelift, $65,000. Then I think, what do I want a fucking facelift for? $65,000? That's a lot of money. Well, look at your face. You want to look pretty good.

That's six scholarships to a community college. No, if I'm sagging and bagging all over the place, good. I don't care. No, it just, I can't wait. E. Jean, you wrote about all of Robbie's superstitions. Which ones do you think are funniest? And Robbie, which ones do you believe helped you win this case and ensure that you prevail in the future? Oh my. For me, every single one of them. No question about it.

I was on the stand for three days. Joe Toccappina cross-examined me for two straight days. After I got off the stand, we went back to the offices and Matt Craig, who was on the Carol team, went over and guess what he did? He opened a bottle of, oh my God, of champagne. It may as well been a hand grenade. Robbie backed up like, no champagne until we win. No champagne. I mean, she was terrified and Matt just said, fuck it, I'm drinking. But Robbie wouldn't touch it. So that's- Yeah. That's the one that was funny.

Do you think they all helped you, Robbie? That's very- Every single, look, I have no way of knowing, obviously none of us do, what helped or what doesn't. So I believe every single one of them is necessary. I had to do it, and if we have to do another case, I will do it again. Carol Martin got off the stand. Robbie's in the car next to me.

She said, Carol Martin just won our case. And then she spits three times. Meaning? Because God is listening to Robbie Kaplan say that Carol Martin just won the case and God will punish Robbie Kaplan if she doesn't spit three times. I pretend to spit. I don't actually spit. Okay. My grandmother used to do that, Robbie. She was Italian. Kara, what are you superstitious of, Kara? Nothing.

Really? I believe that. No, not at all. You don't wear special shoes, special socks, or special... No, no. You have a lucky outfit? Nope. Lucky pair of jeans?

Nope. Lucky sunglasses? No. And when people ask me what I'm scared of, I say scary things. I don't know what to tell you. Like most things, no, but scary things, yes. Nope, nothing. I'm not superstitious at all. Wow.

You weren't raised Catholic, were you? I was, but I walk under ladders, I guess. So let me ask you your last question. When we're in this situation and there's a feeling of spiraling out of control of the Trump people with this Epstein thing. You're seeing, I was telling Scott on Pivot just a second ago, you're starting to see their ass, right? You're starting to see the fractures and fissures and things like that.

That said, the damage being done is vast and will continue until he either is gone or he lacks power or both or whatever. And the likelihood of it continuing, I feel, is not, is very clear that no one can hold it together except him. How are you looking at this moment right now? Despite your victories and everything else, how do you look at this moment? I just believe that my job is to keep fighting. And even though a lot of people would say that my cynical instincts as a lawyer are very good, at bottom, I think I'm hopeful. And I do think we will be able to turn this around.

It's going to take some time. It's going to take a lot of pain for a lot of people. This moment, Kara, I grab the joy whenever it comes on. That's how I'm looking at this moment. We have to stop being despondent and look at each other. It's called praxis. We organize. When we organize, we can change laws. That's what we need to do. I'm going to suggest that at the end of this month, we all get together on social media and all text the same thing.

I don't know. Do you have an idea what we can all text? Really, Kara? Yes, I do. This fucking guy. Oh! There you go. May I put that on the sub stack? You may, please do. This fucking guy is my favorite expression for so many people. Why don't we all get on whatever social media we have? I don't know if that'll help.

We all publish that at the same time, the same day, at the same hour. Okay, go for it. Beating the pants. This fucking guy. I say that about a lot of people, this fucking guy. Oh, boy. I am going to quote you all over. Let's get this going. Okay? All right. All right. Okay. This fucking guy. Okay. Well, yeah. Well, you seem to have beaten him. Anyway, you guys-

This is good. Thank you so much for both of you and three spits for everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Kara. I appreciate it. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Megan Burney, Alison Rogers, and Kailin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're ready for a battle like Henry V at Agincourt. If not, pew pew pew, three spits for you too. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow and

don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us, we'll be back on Monday with more.