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born 1943, raised in Fort Wayne
The claim: Elizabeth Jean Carroll was born on 12 December 1943 in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Fort Wayne, the oldest of four children on Illsley Place, in a house where, by her own telling, the magazines arrived in stacks. Her mother, Betty McKinney Carroll, was an Allen County Republican politician; her father was an inventor. Carroll dates her vocation to a Fort Wayne afternoon at age twelve: her father had a letter printed in Time magazine, the whole street celebrated, and the girl decided, in her words from a recent interview, that from that moment she wanted to be a magazine writer, and began filling the United States mail with pitches, unanswered, for twenty-four years. She attended Indiana University, was crowned Miss Indiana University and, in 1964, Miss Cheerleader USA.
The career: The pitches were answered at last in New York. Carroll became the first female contributing editor at Playboy, by her own account, wrote for the national magazines of the era, and from 1993 to 2019 wrote "Ask E. Jean," the Elle magazine advice column that made her a household name of a particular, funny, unsparing kind. Then, in her late seventies, she became a central figure in the largest American story of her decade: in May 2023 a federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded her five million dollars, and in January 2024 a second jury awarded her a far larger defamation judgment. This section records the verdicts as verdicts and nothing more. Her full entry stands in the people record. The fame roll carries her because the Fort Wayne formation is documented in her own voice: a politician's daughter on an Allen County street, who read her father's letter in Time and spent the rest of her life in magazines.
Sources:
- Her published biography (born 12 December 1943, Detroit; raised in Fort Wayne; the Allen County politician mother; Indiana University; Miss Cheerleader USA, 1964; the "Ask E. Jean" column, 1993-2019).
- Magazeum, "She's Our Type" (the Illsley Place childhood in her own telling; the father's Time letter and the decision at twelve; the Playboy first).
- The verdicts of May 2023 and January 2024, as widely reported from the federal court record.