Here’s Why Advice Columnist E Jean Carroll Says She Won’t Bring Rape Charge Against Trump

The magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of raping her said she would not bring charges against Trump because of women on the border, according to an interview with MSNBC Friday evening.

E. Jean Carroll, 75, has had an advice column in Elle magazine called “Ask E. Jean” since 1993. She accused Trump of raping her when she 52 in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. The accusation is part of her upcoming book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.” The first-person account was featured as an excerpt from her book in New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer.

Carroll announced that she would not bring a rape charge against Trump in an interview with MCNBC’s “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” Friday. Carroll said that it would be “disrespectful of the women down on the border” who she alleges are being “raped around the clock without any protection.”

“It would just be disrespectful,” Carroll said in the interview. “Mine was three minutes. I can handle it. I can keep going. My life has gone on, I’m a happy woman but for the women down there and for the women — actually around the world, and every culture this is going on.” 

There have been reports of migrant women being raped by their smugglers and strangers as they travel across the border. Trump has used this danger as a reason for developing a border wall, stating that “1 in 3 women” are raped while traveling through Mexico.

Carroll did not explain the reasoning behind why bringing a rape charge against Trump would equal disrespect for other women who have been raped, although her book does include another abuse allegation and she expresses regret at not reporting that one.

“I could have spoke up,” Carroll wrote in her upcoming book. “Maybe not when I was 12 but when I was 25. He died when I was 34. I might have stopped him.”

The White House denied the allegations, issuing a statement according to NY Mag.

“This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad,” the statement read according to NY Mag.

Trump also commented on the allegations, saying that her book should “be sold in the fiction section” and that there is “zero evidence” for the accusation, according to a statement.

Ms. Carroll & New York Magazine: No pictures? No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened.

False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.

If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.

Carroll said she was also assaulted by former CBS CEO Les Moonves, who resigned after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced in 2018. Moonves denies the allegations that he assaulted Carroll.