Within the wooden walls of her log cabin, Trump nemesis E Jean Carroll is, quite literally, on a roll. She’s swiveling and spinning and bouncing up and down, arms flailing to emphasize her points. After a while, it dawns on me: is she sitting on an exercise ball?

‘I am!’ she exclaims, tilting back and swaying wildly, then leaning into the Zoom camera. ‘I know I should warn people, so you don’t get seasick. I’m on this thing all day. It just is so entertaining.’

Carroll, 81, a gonzo journalist turned agony aunt turned feminist activist, is remarkably upbeat in an interview with the Daily Mail to discuss her new book, ‘Not My Type,’ an extraordinarily rambling romp through her courtroom battles with President Donald Trump.

The book’s title is ripped directly from Trump’s mouth; he uttered those three words when asked about her allegations of sexual assault in the spring of 1996 in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman. His remarks were subsequently brought up in trial.

Carroll, who sued Trump twice, once for sexual abuse and again for defamation, was awarded $5 million in May 2023 and an additional $83 million in January 2024.

But 18 months after her legal victory, Trump is back in the White House. Her former lawyer is mired in controversy. And Carroll is yet to see a penny of the cash Trump owes her.

It’s grim, serious stuff – yet she finds it all very amusing.

‘As many women will tell you who have been sexually assaulted: If you don’t laugh at this stuff, you can’t rise above it,’ she says. ‘Women have been laughing at terrible things like this for centuries.’

And laugh she does. Carroll, still bouncing on the exercise ball inside her self-described ‘hovel’ in upstate New York, guffaws her way through the trials. In fact, she calls them ‘hysterical.’

‘It was not my fault that the things going on around me were hilarious,’ she says, explaining why she decided to write a book. ‘I mean there were the lawyers, the events, the defense. The jury, the judge. They were all so delicious.

‘All you have to do is sit in the courtroom and see Donald Trump waddle in – an old fat guy. He looked like an elderly gigolo coming covered in saffron makeup, and his hair like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.’

After the collapse of two marriages, she now lives alone in a joyous bubble of her own creation with her two dogs (Miss Havisham and Guffington Von Fluke) and cat (Vagina T Fireball).

The phrase ‘always amused, never angry’ is daubed in paint above her fireplace.

For two decades, Carroll’s cabin in the forest – piled high with books, its walls lined with black and white family photos, animal skulls and Stetson hats – has been her refuge from the world and where she retreats to write. It’s also where she feels most safe: a bow hangs beside her, and she keeps strong by shooting arrows across a ravine by her home. Her shotgun, named Aphrodite, is never far from hand.

‘It’s been a great life,’ she says. ‘I love it. All lives have ups and downs. You know, what I went through is nothing compared to a lot of people. I think of the immigrants now. I have had a very happy life, very satisfying.’

But what of those ‘downs’ – some self-inflicted – like her much-criticized appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show in January 2024, the night she won $83 million in damages from Trump.

Bubbling with enthusiasm, she declared that she and Maddow would go shopping in France: ‘We’re going to get completely new wardrobes, new shoes… Rachel, what do you want? Penthouse? It’s yours, Rachel!’

Looking back, does this perhaps unseemly victory lap, which saw her mingle with stars and be trailed by documentary makers, give pause for thought?

‘Are you kidding?’ she says, bouncing joyfully on that exercise ball. ‘Nothing, nothing like a party. Listen! Seize the moment of joy, seize the moment of joy. There are not very many in life, so we should be trying to have a little bit every day.’

But was that glee, in hindsight, premature? After all, Trump is more powerful than ever, while Carroll is still waiting for her check.

‘F***, no,’ says Carroll. ‘A woman is not allowed to joke?’

In fact, she is adamant that money is an afterthought – and doesn’t intend to spend it on herself. Much like her idol, Jeff Bezos’s first wife MacKenzie Scott, who is reveling in giving away the billions awarded in their divorce, Carroll will delightfully dole out the cash to causes of her choosing.

‘I live very happily, as you see, in a small cabin,’ says Carroll. ‘Money is not important to me. Personally, I couldn’t care less about it, so I’m going to give the money to everything Trump hates, like women’s rights.

‘My aim is to piss off Donald Trump by giving his money, his hard-earned money, to things he hates.’

Last week, Carroll, accompanied by her attorney Roberta Kaplan, was back in court to try to force Trump to pay up. (He is appealing, insisting he has presidential immunity, though Carroll scoffs at his argument.)

Carroll is adamant that Kaplan, who she lovingly calls ‘Robbie,’ is little short of a saint – despite the lawyer resigning from the board of Times Up, the organization founded in the wake of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, which provided legal and financial support to combat sexual harassment.

In August 2021, the New York state attorney general’s office found that Kaplan had reviewed a draft of a scathing op-ed – which was never published – attacking the character of Lindsey Boylan, the first alleged victim to accuse then-Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment.

The revelation that their chairwoman was allegedly working to discredit an accuser elicited fury from the sexual assault survivors, who wrote an open letter claiming Kaplan ‘weaponized their knowledge of survivors experiences to help Governor Cuomo and his office retaliate.’

In her resignation letter, Kaplan did not acknowledge her connection to Cuomo, but said she had ‘reluctantly come to the conclusion that an active law practice is no longer compatible’ with serving on the Time’s Up board.

‘Unfortunately, recent events have made it clear that even our apparent allies in the fight to advance women can turn out to be abusers,’ Kaplan wrote, a reference to Cuomo’s public support of the #MeToo movement, which included his signing of sweeping new protections in 2019 against sexual harassment.

Yet ever-sanguine Carroll downplays the controversy involving Kaplan.

‘It didn’t bother me at all,’ says Carroll, who dedicated her book to Kaplan. ‘The governor deserved a bright lawyer, and what she did was read an agreement. She didn’t in any way work for him, in his administration. Of course, Cuomo would ask for her opinion. She’s one of the most powerful attorneys in the country.

‘As a matter of fact, we have to work with powerful men to get progress. We have to be very smart: work with, or against, whatever, however, we can to get what we want, which is women’s rights. Better education. Better family care.’

In June of last year, Kaplan resigned from the law firm she founded in 2017 amid complaints over her treatment of colleagues.

Several people whom she worked with told the New York Times that ‘she had insulted employees, inappropriately commented on their looks and threatened to derail people’s careers.’ Lawyers for Kaplan denied the allegations at the time.

As far as Carroll is concerned, she bounces on. She also shrugs off the apparent dissonance between her overt optimism and the attack that she describes as a ‘horrible event.’

‘I’m not someone who has centered her whole life on an assault,’ she says. ‘I’m someone who moved on from it and took my life forward from it. That’s not to say I didn’t suffer a lot of harm.’

She recalls being stunned when a psychiatrist, hired by her legal team during the trials, found the assault had, indeed, a profound impact.

‘It shocked me because I had never been to a therapist,’ she admits. ‘I’m an advice columnist. Therapists generally wrote to me, so I just thought I knew everything, and of course I’m completely ignorant. And we found out that I did suffer – and I thought I’d moved on from it.’

Though, while she can laugh at herself, she insists ‘Not My Type’ is no joke.

‘Every person on the face of the earth needs to read this book. Every single person you know,’ she says. ‘Women particularly need to read it because it shows how one old, 81-year-old, desiccated woman beat Donald Trump – twice.’

As she makes the ‘two’ gesture with her hand, balloons explode on the screen of our conversation. It’s a pre-programmed Zoom effect that makes her chuckle: fireworks, confetti, all with the snap of her fingers.

She continues: ‘Women need to read it because there is a lot about how my look had to change for trial, how my hair had to change, how my makeup changed. Everything changed because I had to look f***able.

‘And if I didn’t look f***able the jury would not believe that I that I had been attacked. That is not easy when you’re 81.’

At the time of writing, the book sits at no. 4 on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list, its success stunning Carroll. Though she knows it also places her firmly back in MAGA’s line of fire.

‘I’m used to being hated. I couldn’t be hated any more than I am. So let’s just let people know how hysterically funny Trump is,’ she says.

Yet the book comes at a perplexing time. Kaplan’s Time’s Up ceased operations in January 2023. Admitted domestic abuser Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs walked on the most serious charges that he faced in his recent federal trial. High profile ‘MeToo’ men, like Bill Cosby, have had their convictions overturned. And there seems to be a growing cultural skepticism of women who claim abuse at the hands of powerful men.

But E Jean Carroll has no regrets, rolling with the punches, balancing, seemingly unbothered, on her exercise ball.

‘You know how the world works,’ she says matter-of-factly, it will ‘never run out of bad guys.’

‘Things go up and they go down, we go forward then we go back,’ she muses. And her book is, apparently, selling. So, life is good.