In her book excerpt recounting an alleged sexual assault by President Trump, E. Jean Carroll wrote that she confided in two friends at the time about what happened. Now those two women have come forward publicly to corroborate her account in the New York Times podcast The Daily, which also features Carroll. Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach recall their conversations with Carroll after the incident, which she alleges happened in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, as well as their conflicting advice, per a Times recap. "I said: Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn't tell anybody this," says Martin, a former news anchor for WCBS-TV. But in a separate conversation, Birnbach told her the opposite and says the two women "fought" over what to do next.
She says Carroll rejected her advice to go to the police or even to come to Birnbach's house. "I’ll take you to the police," she recalls saying again, and again Carroll said no. "It was 15 minutes of my life, it’s over," she quotes Carroll as saying, along with, "Don't ever tell anybody, I just had to tell you." Carroll, now 75, was asked if she felt "responsibility for what had happened." She answers "100%," noting she'd been helping Trump pick out lingerie. She does not use the word rape to describe what happened. "Every woman gets to choose her word," she says in the podcast. "My word is fight. My word is not the victim word." She adds: "I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought." (Trump adamantly denies Carroll's account.)
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