I think it’s a handsome-looking gun, don’t you?” E. Jean Carroll asked. We were perched against the glass counter of a gun shop just off a highway in New York State, near the New Jersey border, and Carroll — a slight blonde in a vintage Donna Karan riding jacket and pink aviator sunglasses — was gripping a 20-gauge Mossberg shotgun against her 107-pound frame. Tommy, a red-faced retired cop and Carroll’s unofficial bodyguard, was assessing the fit. Could she hold it comfortably? Did she like how it felt? How quickly did she think she could get to it in a pinch?
The room had stained corkboard ceilings and fluorescent lights. Tacked to a wall, next to an outdated pinup calendar, was a poster depicting Ronald Reagan as Rambo — RONBO — his head superimposed on Sylvester Stallone’s shirtless, oiled body, firing a machine gun. To our left was an indoor shooting range; a group of young Orthodox Jewish men peered through the soundproof glass, watching a shooter in an orange safety vest fire toward the head of a human silhouette. Next to the cash register, propped up on the counter, was a roll of toilet paper printed with Hillary Clinton’s face. The cashier was a cheerful man in a handlebar mustache and a LET’S GO BRANDON hat.
“We are awash in testosterone,” Carroll whispered as I scanned the man in the hat to determine if he recognized her.
It was February of last year, just a couple weeks after Carroll, a former advice columnist, TV personality, and — this part is often forgotten — celebrated magazine writer, had been awarded a stunning sum of money in her second of two lawsuits against Donald Trump: $83.3 million plus interest. For days now, her face, and that recognizable blonde bob, had been plastered all over the news; she was the accuser who’d won — and beaten him not once but twice. Trump was railing about the “witch hunt” against him, calling Carroll a liar and accusing her of colluding with “Democrat operatives,” repeating the very claims for which he’d just been found liable for defamation — and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, was threatening to sue him again. Almost overnight, Carroll had become a hero of the era, of both the “resistance” and Me Too. And everybody wanted to know what she was going to do with the money.
The new winnings came on top of $5 million already owed to her from the first trial, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. The funds had been sitting untouched in a court-controlled trust for seven months. Her friends were trying to convince her to rent an apartment in the city — the money would come to her soon enough, they thought — but for now Carroll was staying home in the secluded cabin upstate where she’d lived for two decades.
The day before the trip to the gun shop, the local police chief had knocked on her front door. In his freshly starched blues, he’d taken an awkward seat on a chair upholstered in old flannel shirts and explained, kindly and somewhat apologetically, that Carroll would need to turn in her handgun. For nearly five years — since she’d first accused the sitting president of rape and the death threats had begun — she’d slept with a loaded revolver, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, next to her bed. She’d inherited it from her father, and though it looked more like a prop from a western than an actual weapon, she’d fired it enough to know it worked. But she didn’t have a license, a fact that Trump’s defense attorneys had recently made public.
Carroll agreed to turn it in, then immediately picked up the phone. She may not have had a license for a handgun, but in her part of the state, she wouldn’t need one for a shotgun. While she was away for the trial, her dog walkers had reported that a strange car seemed to be staking out her house — driving up and down her street, parking at the top of her long driveway — and she didn’t want to be there without armed protection for even a couple days. And so as the police chief was making his way down the wooded path to his cruiser, her dogs trotting after him, Carroll rang up Tommy and asked if he would take us to the nearest shop.
The total, for the new shotgun and two hot-pink pepper sprays, came to $611.99. Carroll handed over her ID and credit card and declared herself famished.
Over the next few months, she would be on something of a grand victory lap. In April, Time named her one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2024” along with Dua Lipa and Taraji P. Henson. In May, she was the keynote speaker at a dinner for Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women,” where an audience in tailored suits, including Melinda French Gates, cheered as she said she knew in her gut that Trump would lose the election. In July, Rolling Stone and Variety honored her with their joint Truth Seeker Award. She was photographed with celebrities; a party was thrown in her honor at Superiority Burger in the East Village. Throughout much of it, she was trailed by a camera crew for a documentary about her life. Studios wanted to buy her life rights.
But by the late fall, she was mostly on her own again, back on Frog Island — what she calls her compound in the woods. The invitations came less often. The culture was shifting.
Now, the documentary is almost complete, and it is supposed to premiere at Telluride late this summer — but the filmmaker has struggled to raise funding. It’s safe to say Me Too has been over for some time. Bill Cosby has been free since 2021, his conviction for sexual assault thrown out on a technicality. In Harvey Weinstein’s recent retrial in New York, he had the support of prominent mainstream defenders such as Joe Rogan. (Weinstein was acquitted for one of his three alleged sex crimes and reconvicted for another, while a mistrial was declared for the third.) Andrew Cuomo, previously contrite in the face of sexual-harassment claims, is running for mayor and leading in most polls. Trump, of course, is once again commander-in-chief of the country, grubbing forward, loosening his belt with power. The millions of dollars he owes Carroll — almost $100 million in total, including interest — are locked in limbo. He has appealed both verdicts, and Carroll’s lawyers suspect he may fight all the way to the Supreme Court. (A lawyer representing Trump in the litigation did not respond to a request for comment.)
Carroll, in the time since the second trial, has quietly written a new book. Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, a minute-by-minute, motion-by-motion retelling of the two court cases, written in the choppy, gonzo style Carroll became known for in the 1980s, publishes June 17 and has been kept entirely secret until now — so tightly guarded that Carroll herself did not have a copy until a week before it arrived on store shelves. The book had been sold in March 2024, but after the election, conversations between Carroll and her editor moved to Signal, page proofs were delivered by hand, and booksellers were required to sign NDAs. There was a nebulous fear of what the president might do: “This is Trump,” Carroll’s publicist told me. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Carroll, who loves a stunt, couldn’t help but enjoy it all a little. “Jessica,” she’s repeated, “nobody knows!”
I visited her again at her cabin earlier this month. She told me she hasn’t had to use the shotgun, but she’s ready if she needs to: “There’s one in the chamber.” She practices a drill, sometimes twice a day: standing up from her bed, grabbing the gun from its place against the wall, raising it, and releasing the safety. The gun is named Aphrodite, she says, because “she’s long, lusty, and lethal.”
I asked Carroll what it feels like to be living through a backlash; it was on my mind lately. But she countered immediately. We were living, she said, through the first time period “in a hideous human history” when we had at least a small inkling of how “chock-full of predators” the “rulers’ houses” are. “This is good, Jessica,” she said. “This is stunning.”
For her court appearances in her cases against Trump, Carroll shrewdly re-created her look from the year of the assault, wearing items she wore in 1996, including this Armani jacket and these Vivienne Westwood saddle shoes.
The way her friends tell it, there have long been two E. Jean Carrolls: the one who seems to know everybody, who used to pal around with Geraldo Rivera (the best man in her second wedding, to a TV newscaster), and who once dated the writer Anthony Haden-Guest. The one who could always get a seat at Elaine’s, who drinks her martinis dry with both a lemon and a lime twist. Then there’s the more private Carroll, who lives like a recluse in the cozy but dusty three-room cabin she calls her “hovel.”
Carroll bought the Frog Island property in the mid-aughts, though she’s been upstate, and on her own, since the early ’90s. She says that nothing in the house, with the exception of Aphrodite and some of her clothing, is worth more than $100. Since 2019, when Elle magazine killed off her advice column, “Ask E. Jean,” after 26 years, Carroll has lived primarily off her earnings from Substack, where she sends a weekly newsletter — nominally an advice column — to some 49,000 subscribers. Lately, she says, reader questions have slowed to a trickle, and she’s taken to posing questions to subscribers herself, often in size-30 font: “Are you lucky?” “What’s the dumbest thing you did lately?” She still brings in close to six figures, but she lives more like someone subsisting on Social Security. Her breakfast is peanut butter on multigrain Dave’s Killer Bread, sometimes heated in the microwave. When I once suggested, after she’d won the second trial and theoretically come into millions of dollars, that perhaps she should buy a toaster, she replied, “But if I get a toaster, will I want an oven? If I get a toaster, then I’m going to want a stove. Then who am I? I’m nobody. I’m somebody with a stove.”
Her house is a half-mile from a mountainous stretch of the Appalachian Trail, which she hikes regularly with one of her two large dogs, a Great Pyrenees named Miss Havisham, after the jilted spinster in Great Expectations. (The other dog is a pit-bull–husky mix named Guffington Von Fluke. Getting him was a fluke, she says; he was a rescue from the ASPCA.) Out front, there’s a river; in the back, a stream and an in-ground pool from the 1930s, thick with reeds and algae and swimming with frogs and tadpoles. The front yard is her archery range; she shoots arrows across the river into a ravine. She says that “every woman should have a quiver.”
Inside the house, wood-paneled rooms are hung with stained-glass chandeliers, cowboy hats, and animal skulls collected from the yard; books pile high on almost every surface, including the bathroom sink. On the mantel above the fireplace is a hand-painted mantra: ALWAYS AMUSED, NEVER ANGRY. Scratched into the light above the bathroom mirror are the words ALL IS VANITY.
The property, with its winding walkway and small twinkling camping mirrors in the bushes and trees, is inviting in a kind of Alice in Wonderland way. But the shed in the back woods, on which Carroll decided to scrawl, in black paint, the names of dozens of her favorite authors and children’s books (Jane Austen; Charles Dickens; Old Yeller; Dick and Jane), has more of a RED RUM, Stanley Kubrick aura. This is the Carroll her lawyers were largely successful in keeping from the public: the woman who types in ALL CAPS, who has half a dozen wigs stacked in her closet (with names like Trixie, Trudy, and Tallulah), who signs her emails “Ravishing regards,” and who has a cat named Vagina T. Fireball.
I first met Carroll in only slightly more guarded form in the city, at the intersection of Tenth Avenue and 19th Street in the summer of 2019, on assignment. It was three days after she appeared on the cover of this magazine in the coatdress she said she was wearing when Donald Trump attacked her, and she grabbed my hand within moments of meeting. I’d never heard of her before she came forward, but I’d interviewed many victims of sexual assault, and there were certain things I’d come to expect — namely, caution. Carroll, however, had no publicist, lawyer, or wingwoman by her side. She was staying alone in a budget hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, traipsing the city in a pink flight suit. (I would later learn this was her uniform; she has at least a dozen, many vintage from the ’60s and ’70s, and in every color.) Far from downtrodden or traumatized or remotely fearful, she was almost jubilant.
“Jessica, I’m fabulous!” she said as we sat down for lunch at a diner in Chelsea and I asked her, gently, how she was doing. Her knee-jerk positivity was so extreme that it had become a topic unto itself in both of her court cases. How could she possibly have laughed on the phone when telling her friend Lisa Birnbach about Trump’s attack, for example? “She is somebody,” Birnbach, a humor writer and her close friend for three decades, had testified, “who puts on lipstick, dusts herself off, and moves on.”
Like so many things about Carroll, this was true and not. That first day, she took me to Bergdorf Goodman, the site of the assault. Stopping to examine a pair of opal Ted Muehling earrings — she needed a gift for a friend — she breezily pointed me toward the area, the former lingerie department, where she says it took place. She claims Bergdorf was, and is still, her favorite store. “Ah, the smell,” she’d said, sighing, when we walked through the front doors. “It smells like money!”
As it turned out, Carroll had been taking groups of strangers to Bergdorf for a couple months before she’d divulged her decades-old secret about Trump. She’d created a guided Me Too walking tour she’d been advertising on her Instagram, called “The Hideous Men Tour.” It took place on the first and third Sunday of each month, and like mobster tours, or Sex and the City tours, or those of hidden architectural gems, hers was built around landmarks: buildings where famous men had allegedly violated unfamous women. Matt Lauer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Trump all made appearances. But Bergdorf was the meeting spot only; Carroll made no mention of its significance. At Trump Tower, Carroll listed off the women who at the time had accused the president of sexual misconduct. She was not included.
This was classic E. Jean: She is in part a performance artist, always lightly prodding. She loves a gimmick and a covert message; she’s game for a clever bit of mischief, and her idiosyncrasies are often revealed to have some careful rationale. But the tour also mimicked the way she had danced with her past since the assault: stepping close and remaining far, repulsed and magnetized — driven by what had happened, pulling away from it, and coming back.
She’d told me, not long after her second court win, that Trump was merely “dust” — nothing to her. “I am just up in the woods throwing the ball for my dogs,” she declared. “I am not thinking about him!” And yet the new book voluntarily revisits, even relives, the moments when he took over her life. The title itself is a sort of retort to Trump, who rather infamously told a reporter, when Carroll first came forward, “No. 1, she’s not my type.” (Her lawyers would highlight in court that she, in fact, seemed to be exactly his type — so much so that Trump, under deposition, misidentified her in a photo as his former wife Marla Maples.)
It was as Carroll had said one day on the phone last year, a few months after the trial: “We are in this forever, me and him.”
Carroll “wanted a big life,” her friend Lisa Chase, her former editor at Elle and Outside magazine, told me. “The kind that men get to have and don’t have to answer for.”
She’d started out as Betty Jean, a cheerleader and beauty-pageant queen from rural Indiana, whose father owned a furniture store and told his daughters to “keep a smile on your face,” and who, despite her relentlessly upbeat demeanor, was always going against the grain. “She was really smart, and she was really beautiful, and she was really popular, and she was always in trouble,” said her sister, Cande.
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Carroll studied at Indiana University, joined a sorority and the cheerleading squad, and was crowned Miss Cheerleader USA, which earned her a scholarship, a trip to meet President Johnson in the Rose Garden, and a cover photo on The Indianapolis Star Sunday Magazine, posing with her pom-poms. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and worked as a restaurant hostess, then a market researcher for Procter & Gamble, interviewing women about sanitary napkins and dandruff shampoo, and later an English teacher at a reform school. She began dating her first husband, Stephen Byers, when he was running a dive bar, and they moved to Ennis, Montana. He hunted and fly-fished while she rode her horse — named Miss Hot. Montana was cheap then and the pair hosted parties for aspiring literary types hiding out there. Byers worked as a firefighter and dreamed of writing fiction, while Carroll quietly pursued journalism, sending unsolicited work to magazines in New York. “He wanted to be Ernest Hemingway,” she said, “and I tried to become a writer.”
She liked being a wife, but when, after 12 years of marriage, she got her first assignment for Esquire — at the ripe age of 37, her work had been plucked out of the slush pile — she packed a U-Haul in the middle of the night, so their neighbors wouldn’t see, and drove to New York. She moved into a dirt-floor basement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, underneath a family of fortune tellers, with, she says, one pair of jeans, a couple shirts, a fringe jacket, and a pair of banana-yellow cowgirl boots. “I thought I had it going on,” she told me. “This was before Instagram. I thought I had everything because I never saw what anybody else had.”
Carroll landed her first cover story in 1983 for Outside, the adventure magazine that launched Jon Krakauer’s career, after she cold-called Fran Lebowitz, who was then fresh off the success of her first two books, and asked if she could take her camping. Lebowitz had famously described the outdoors as “what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.” Carroll said she got her number by applying a magnifying glass to a photo in Vogue in which the author was holding her home phone.
Over the next two decades, Carroll made a name for herself in the tradition of New Journalism, thrusting herself into precarious situations, finding wild and unexpected angles. Once, she hid out in the closet of a male escort while he was having sex with a client. (“I’d be fired for that today,” she said.) She believed that the thing to do, when reporting profiles, was to get the subject to “act up,” and in her Rolling Stone cover story on Billy Idol, she describes the singer calling her a “cunt” in the opening paragraph. In a feature on Lyle Lovett, for Esquire, she interrogates Lovett about a rumor that he, then married to Julia Roberts, was well endowed. (She also describes his hair as “hanging off his head like a big veal chop.”) For Playboy, where she was a contributing editor, she trekked through the mountains of Papua New Guinea “in search of primitive man”: The idea, she told me, was that modern western men had gotten soft and she needed to go to the edge of the earth to find one who wasn’t. (She said she lost 20 pounds and almost died while reporting the story.)
In 1990, Carroll went after her hero, Hunter S. Thompson. Seated at a table next to him at a dinner at Elaine’s, she whispered the name of one of his former mistresses in his ear. Then she showed up at his cabin in Woody Creek, Colorado, and informed him she would be writing his biography — which she did. For Hunter, which was published in 1993, she lived alongside him, watching him snort cocaine, drop acid, take sleeping pills, and drink Chivas Regal for breakfast. At one point in the book, she describes sitting on the edge of his hot tub, high on a tab of LSD he’d convinced her to take, believing herself to be Elizabeth Taylor. Thompson pulls her into the water and proceeds to slice her clothes off her body with a nine-inch hunting knife. (Carroll writes in the book’s opening, “I have heard the biographers of Harry S. Truman, Catherine the Great, etc., etc., say they would give anything if their subjects were alive so they could ask them some questions. I, on the other hand, would give anything if my subject were dead. He should be.”) Recently, she’d recounted the hot-tub story to a couple of neighbors. “They were horrified!” she said. “To me, it was an adventure. You know?”
Carroll was married for the second time in 1987 to the anchorman John Johnson; she says they wrote their prenup on a cocktail napkin. The two divorced in 1990. After Trump’s assault, six years later, Carroll was never intimate with another man again. “My desire for desire was over,” she told me one night at a restaurant in an old farmhouse near her town. “It was dead, and I never met somebody who could reawaken it. I can never get that back. Just, you know, fixing dinner with someone and laughing your asses off — all that.”
And yet, around the same time as the assault, her career became all about romance and relationships. When Carroll was 50, after a brief stint writing for Saturday Night Live alongside Al Franken and Phil Hartman (“I was terrible,” she said), she was recruited to write an advice column for Elle and quickly established herself as the wacky but reliable “Auntie E,” to whom thousands of women divulged their secrets. “Ask E. Jean” would lead to a daily talk show, a tongue-in-cheek dating book (Mr. Right, Right Now!), a dating website (greatboyfriends.com, eventually sold to the Knot), a matchmaking service, and a mobile game in which players competed to break up fictional couples.
She eventually grew tired of it all, and after a quarter-century of receiving letters from strangers, she’d come to see men as the source of women’s problems. So in 2017, she set out on a road trip across the country to gather material for her next book: She was going to drive to towns named after women, eat only foods made by women, read only books by women, and at each stop ask women, “What do we need men for?” Not long after she departed New York, however, on a highway in Pennsylvania with her poodle, Lewis Carroll, in the back seat, she got a news alert on her phone: Harvey Weinstein had been paying off sexual-harassment accusers — at least eight of them — over decades. “I could hardly move,” she said. “I couldn’t help but think of men in my own life.”
By the time she reached Indiana, her plans had changed. She could no longer be the apolitical jester she’d been.
In May, I went with Carroll to a recording studio at her publisher’s offices — a soundproof room high above lower Broadway. It wasn’t the usual space used for audiobook production; the team didn’t want any staff, outside a small circle, to see Carroll. She was in a flight suit — this one royal blue, paired with a gauzy white scarf and white platform Dr. Martens.
“Do you know why I have never seen a therapist in my life?” she began, starting the second chapter. She was talking with her hands, almost as if conducting an orchestra, her long fingers rising with the intonation of the question.
“Because I get over things.” She paused.
“Do you know how I get over things?” she asked.
“I do not dwell. You know how I do not dwell?”
She paused again.
“I forget it.”
And yet when it comes to Donald Trump, she continued, looking toward her producer to make sure the levels were good, “I have not ‘gotten over things.’ ”
Carroll would spend the rest of the afternoon recording a series of lists featured in the book: a list of all the men she’d ever slept with (which she’d been asked by Trump’s lawyers to recount), a list of the steps in her morning routine, and a list of clothes she’d packed for court. That last one was tripping her up; she was on her third take.
“Brown Bergdorf jacket; cream Oscar skirt.”
“Black Armani jacket; cream Oscar skirt.”
“Jessica!” she shouted through the glass. “You’re lucky I don’t have Aphrodite here with me or I would shoot off my tongue!”
During the trials, multiple articles were written about Carroll’s courtroom style; the clothes — simple and tailored, sophisticated but not showy — were noted to help build her credibility. I presumed she’d had a stylist help her, but no, she told me, she’d done it herself. And in fact, almost everything she’d worn were clothes she’d had in rotation in 1996, the year of the alleged assault, down to the black-and-white Vivienne Westwood saddle shoes and the black leather belt, with a gold hand clasp, that she’d borrowed from a friend and never returned. Her hair, a sandy blonde bob, was colored and styled by the same woman who’d done it 30 years before — she’d tracked her down at a salon in New Jersey. Her makeup — Chanel foundation with a smoky eye and a pale-pink lip — was as it had been. In the book, Carroll describes the motivation: She needed the jury to see her as she was then, as someone Trump would have found appealing.
“White Armani jacket,” she continued, speaking into the microphone. “Black Piazza Sempione skirt.”
“Metallic Armani blazer; black Piazza Sempione skirt.”
I thought about a sort of list I’d spotted on Carroll’s desk some months before, handwritten on a pad of yellow legal paper. Across the top, in large curling script, were the words, “What Will I Do With My 83 Million? I Am Going to Give It to Things Trump Hates.” To the right, on a diagonal, she’d added, “I’m an invincible old lady.” Below that was a mess of bullet points and stray, floating additions. A collection of statements Trump had made about women — “You have to treat ’em like shit,” for example — were drafted alongside things he supposedly dislikes, such as “wack jobs,” dogs, and “vermin.” She imagined donating to women’s groups of various types, “scholarships for lawyers,” and the ASPCA. She considered creating a special fund for sexual-assault survivors: “I’ll name it the Donald Trump Sexual-Assault Rehabilitation Program.”
Carroll was now hell-bent on getting her affairs in order — her will, a trust. “I’m 81,” she told me. “I could croak at any moment!” Until recently, she’d had only a hand-written will, stored in a thick book of British history, kept on a shelf in her kitchen. Her handyman and his wife had been her witnesses. But last spring, she had it formalized with the help of a white-shoe firm on Park Avenue. (“They’re a very big deal,” she said.)
She refers to the will, in conversation, as “the Disbursal.” A central provision is the establishment of the E. Jean Carroll Foundation — which will receive the majority of her winnings and which, through its philanthropic projects, will have the goal of making Trump “even madder” than he was made by his defeats in court.
When she’d finished recording and was packing up her things, Carroll asked if I thought the book was funny. I thought of her account of spending 22 hours with a trauma-psychology specialist in advance of the first trial, of her being grilled on the stand about why she didn’t scream as Trump assaulted her. There were funny parts, I replied. The stories from her early years as a journalist (Lebowitz had worn loafers on their camping trip to the Shawangunk Mountains, for example); the romping memories of old boyfriends (including not one but two Olympic athletes). I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of Trump’s lawyers: Alina Habba, with a diamond on her finger “as big as a Ritz cracker”; Joe Tacopina, in his tight, pin-striped suits, “eyes glowing like lights on a smoke detector,” and with a voice “like a cello in a stone quarry.”
She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. “The pity fucking kills me,” she said. “It kills my strength.” She wanted the perception to be “the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.” She went on: “The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.” I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even.
This spring, up on Frog Island, Carroll carved a path through the woods behind the house, up a hill, raking leaves and dirt, dragging logs through the brush to border the trail. She calls it “the folly,” and at the top of the incline is a clearing with a little seat made from a stump and wooden board. Each time she makes it to the top, she adds a rock or piece of quartz to a tilted cairn.
Back upstate in early June, I walked the folly with her in the rain. She wrote the new book, she said, in part to show others how an “old woman,” in her words — “not extraordinarily bright,” “not really political,” “not well organized” — could defeat the president. She wanted, she said, to show others “how it’s done.” Yet she’d also told me, not long ago, that she would not advise other women to come forward. For many, the price would be too high, she’d said.
The peace she was pushing toward, climbing her hill, writing her mantras, was not a simple one.
Holding back leafy branches, she told me about the frogs. Every spring, local frogs had mated in her old swimming pool. Every night, when the sun went down, she said, they sang the most beautiful songs. But this year, she’d heard nothing, dead silence. She became convinced the cause was her new lights: Around the time she’d purchased the shotgun, now almost a year and a half ago, she’d had an elaborate security system installed around the property with motion-sensor lights that shone into the pool. She decided to dim them, and the frog songs returned.
I asked her if she worried that could be dangerous. She thought for a moment.
“You understand,” she said, “I don’t care if somebody shoots me. You understand? I don’t really care. I’ve had a nice life. I really mean it. I get it, I’ve had a great life.”
I examined her face, trying to decide if she was being serious. She seemed to be. I remembered something Bill Tonelli, her longtime editor at Esquire, had told me — that Carroll once said she was going to put her dogs’ bodies up in the trees when they died. “Then the birds would come pick them apart, and they would be kind of buried in the air,” he said. “I always imagined somehow that that would be her plan for herself.”
I asked Carroll about this, and she barely took a breath before responding: “I did do it. I buried three dogs that way.” She told me it was how some Native American tribes had long sent off their dead. “When I die,” she continued, “you’ve got to come up here and make sure I’m dropped in a crevice.”
A crevice? I asked.
“There’s a space between two rock formations,” she said. We were nearly at the bottom of the folly now. She stopped and smiled, knowing what her journalist friend would be thinking. “Shall we walk back up to the top so you can see?”
We headed back up, to a ridge near the clearing, where she pointed to two long, jagged rocks, running in parallel, jutting out of the ground. Between them was a gap, about a foot wide, cushioned in moss.
This time I asked aloud if she was serious. She said she was.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 16, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.
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