E. Jean Carroll

Writer — the "Ask E. Jean" columnist

• Born 1943 · Writer and columnist, raised in Fort Wayne

On the record

Elizabeth Jean Carroll was born in Detroit, Michigan, on December 12, 1943, and raised in Fort Wayne, where her mother, Betty McKinney Carroll, was an Allen County politician; Carroll appears as a senior in South Side High School's 1961 yearbook, the Totem. At Indiana University she was crowned Miss Indiana University in 1963 and Miss Cheerleader USA in 1964. She became a magazine writer for Esquire, Outside, and Playboy — where she was the magazine's first woman contributing editor — and wrote for Saturday Night Live in 1986–87. Her advice column "Ask E. Jean" ran in Elle from 1993 to 2019, one of the longest-running advice columns in American magazines. In 2023 a federal jury in New York found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her, and a second jury in 2024 awarded further damages for defamation.

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• § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement

Sources: Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (South Side Totem, 1961); IndyStar (on her Fort Wayne upbringing).