Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Bay Area’s WNBA team unveils its new name, Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro has died at 92, and E. Jean Carroll and Robbie Kaplan share how they defeated Donald Trump—twice. Have a wonderful Wednesday!
– ‘I won.’ Can anything take down Donald Trump? The former president—in court over his hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels—is the Republican nominee for president despite a host of criminal and civil cases swirling around him. And yet, the two women who won against him in court—twice—say he won’t make it back to the Oval Office.
“I don’t care if he’s the nominee,” E. Jean Carroll, who sued Trump for sexual assault, won, and then emerged victorious in a $83.3 million defamation lawsuit against him earlier this year, told me last night. “He’s not going to win.”
Carroll and her attorney, Robbie Kaplan (known for arguing for same-sex marriage in front of the Supreme Court, one stop on a long resume), joined me for a conversation at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women dinner in New York. While Carroll says she thinks the American people see Trump’s true character, Kaplan takes a more measured approach. “The one thing that can bring him down are the votes of the American people in the next election,” Kaplan says. “I don’t think short of that anything can or will.”
E. Jean Carroll, right, and attorney Robbie Kaplan won against Donald Trump in court—twice. Fortune Carroll first shared her story publicly in 2019 of being assaulted by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. Since then, she’s dealt with an onslaught of insults—from Trump himself, who lost the defamation suit as a result—and from others online. But Carroll says the hatred she’s received isn’t so different from what any woman experiences on the internet.
“Every woman in this room has people saying terrible things on X, on Instagram. We all get, ‘You’re ugly, you’re old, you’re shriveled. You don’t deserve this, you’re pathetic, you’re hideous,’” she says. “I am not unusual. Every woman in this room knows exactly what I’m talking about.”
Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein’s New York conviction has been overturned and abortion rights are under attack. “It’s just a blip in the road,” Carroll says.
“We’re upset,” she adds. “But it doesn’t stop us.”
You can read more about my interview with Carroll and Kaplan here.
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
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