E. Jean Carroll Speaks For The First Time About Facing Donald Trump At Trial: “He Was Like Nothing, Like An Emperor Without Clothes”

In her first interviews since a jury on Friday ordered Donald Trump to pay her $83 million in a defamation case verdict, writer E. Jean Carroll this morning described what it was like to face the former president in court.

Carroll told CNN This Morning that she hadn’t seen Trump in close to 30 years, “since he assaulted me in the dressing room.” (Trump was found liable in May 2023 of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, but he did not attend that trial.) 

She said leading up to the court battle she could not sleep or eat or think straight. Asked by George Stephanopoulos on GMA about facing the former president after all these years, Carroll said the thought was “terrifying, until I got there.”

Once she was in the courtroom and got to stare Trump in the eyes, the writer says she realized her fears were unfounded.

“He was like nothing, like an emperor without clothes,” Carroll told GMA. “All my terror leading up to it, and there he is. He’s just something in a suit.” On CNN, she said she realized that Trump’s power seemed derived from those around him, who gave him attention. Without that, Carrol told GMA, “He was just — no power. He was zero.”

Asked what she would do with the money, Carroll told Stephanopoulos, “I’d like to give the money to something Donald Trump hates…Perhaps a fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump.”