In an interview published Friday by Vanity Fair, advice columnist E. Jean Carroll admitted that she once sexually harassed former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes.
Carroll’s admission comes on the heels of the release of her new memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, wherein Carroll names 21 “hideous men” with whom she’d had “unpleasant interactions.” Included on that list is President Donald Trump, who Carroll alleges sexually assaulted her decades ago in a department store dressing room.
Say what?
“[You] confessed to sexually harassing Roger Ailes while you had a show on his cable channel America’s Talking,” Vanity Fair‘s Keziah Weir prompted.
“Oh, I did it. Every day I had a chance,” the 75-year-old author and journalist admitted. “I call him the pearl of his sex.”
She continued: “Right on the air. I roll up my trouser legs. I would wait for the camera to come over. Then I would slowly pull up the right and then the left trouser leg. It would say, ‘Roger Ailes.’ I would say, ‘He’s my future husband.’ It never stopped. I’d ask him to twirl for me. I adored him.”
“Hideous woman”
Carroll added that there’s no difference between what she calls a “hideous man” and a “hideous woman” — as she describes herself — and admitted: “What I did was wrong. Hideous women are hideous.”
But, she says, Ailes “of course ruined America. Me asking him to show me his muscles is not going to ruin America. He actually managed to do that. He picked the next president. People who don’t realize it, it was Roger Ailes who put Donald Trump in the White House. [People] are not aware.”
(In other words, Ailes deserved the harassment she subjected him to because he would go on to help elect Trump decades later.)
Carroll went on to describe other times when she was a “hideous woman,” like when she “flashed” a college professor.
“I had the temerity to walk on the stage in a trench coat and dark glasses, open my trench coat wearing a bright yellow bikini and flash that man four, five, six seconds,” she remembered. “He could barely stand up. Now, if a man did that today to a female professor, I hope that man would be in jail.”
Asked if she felt guilty about that incident, Carroll said: “No. I laugh my a** off about that. My friend emailed me about it. It was great.”
Cringeworthy moment
This was the second awkward interview for the journalist in the past week since Carroll first came forward with allegations of rape, which just happen to coincide with the release of her new book. Sitting down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Carroll caused a stir when she said “most people think of rape as being sexy.”
“ I think most people think of rape as being sexy…” – E. Jean Carroll to Anderson Cooper
Cooper immediately cut to breakpic.twitter.com/OwN2QLFc6q
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) June 25, 2019
When asked about that interview by Vanity Fair, Carroll pointed to The View co-host Joy Behar’s defense of her comments.
“She went on The View and got into an argument and she was defending my vision of the word ‘rape’ being filled with sexual imagery. And fantasy connotations,” Carroll said. She went on:
[Behar] said everyone here has seen Gone With the Wind. She said, you know when Rhett Butler grabs Scarlett O’Hara and picks her up and carries her up the stairs? She’s fighting him. She is slugging his chest, and he is going to take her and he’s going to throw her down. They cut to a scene of her in bed as happy and rosy and fulfilled as any woman. And many women have this fantasy.
During an interview with The New York Times this week, Carroll said that she has “not been raped;” she refuses to identify as a victim, she says, and therefore does not find the word to be an accurate description of her alleged encounter with Trump. Still, she maintains that the now-president forced “his fingers around my private area, [and] thrust[ed] his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”
For his part, Trump has said that Carroll is “totally lying” about the incident.
“I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her,” he told The Hill. “It’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that.”
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