After Donald Trump attacked her in a department store dressing room, Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll told two friends. Those friends—one of whom told Carroll to go to the police and one of whom told her to stay quiet—hadn’t come forward publicly, until now.
Now we know that the first woman was Lisa Birnbach, author of The Official Preppy Handbook, who thought Carroll should go to the police. Birnbach describes realizing over the course of their phone conversation, which happened immediately after the attack, that this was rape and telling Carroll, “Let’s go to the police” and “I’ll take you to the police,” but Carroll refusing. A day or two later, Carroll called Carol Martin, an anchor at New York’s WCBS-TV, who remembers that “I said: Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t tell anybody this,” because Trump had lawyers and would fight the allegations.
Both women had met Trump: Birnbach had interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago, and Martin had met him at work and had a friend who had dated him.
So there you go: Carroll said from the beginning that she had told two friends, and now we have heard from them—both women with substantial professional reputations—corroborating her account.
You can listen to the discussion below from The New York Times podcast, “The Daily.”