When E Jean Carroll First Called It Rape

Hail the conquering heroine. (Photo from her Substack.)

Advice is a tricky thing. You have to be decisive but also self-aware. You can't be an absolutist, but you can't equivocate. For decades, E. Jean Carroll gave the best advice in ELLE Magazine, in the legendary column I read avidly, every single month, for its wisdom and inimitable prose. E. Jean always told a person she could do better—deserved better—than whatever problem was getting her down because she was absolutely brilliant and gorgeous and stylish and canny and she should kick lame men and uncertainty and bad bosses to the curb.

And now she has kicked to the $5 million curb the bad boss to end all bad bosses. In highly recent retrospect—this good news landed less than an hour ago as I write this, that a Manhattan jury found former President Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll,  awarding her a cool $5 million in damages—it seems clear that only she could do it.