did ELLE get cold feet or were they just mad?
If you don’t know E. Jean Carroll from the iconic advice column she’s been writing for ELLE for 26 years, you probably know her as the woman behind this New York mag cover story from last summer, which was an excerpt from her memoir where she made a public rape accusation against the president.
To get you up to speed: Since then, Trump has said some heinous shit back; she’s filed a defamation suit, and she’s also looking to get a DNA sample as evidence — which is all to say that things have only gotten messier for Carroll’s rep since that story came out.
Which brings us to that whole situation with her terminated contract at ELLE, which the NYT tried to parse out on Friday: Since part of Carroll’s defamation suit could point to losing work as a result of her damaged reputation, it seems like a questionable time for ELLE to also suddenly decide not to renew her lucrative contract for 2020.
Carroll’s tweet from last week about the decision ties her firing to the PR shitshow around her legal suit, but the NYT piece also uncovers a few other possible reasons for the termination — namely that A) magazine contracts just aren’t what they used to be, but also B) apparently, Hearst people were p r e t t y peeved that Carroll excerpted that memoir **not** with ELLE, and that was a huge part of the reason why they made the “business decision” to end her contract early.
That was the part that seemed particularly interesting to me. Because the idea that ELLE would get freaked out by the Carroll-Trump news cycle after covering the story themselves for their politics & celeb beats seems strange (but not improbable! Advertisers get spooked by dumb shit all the time!). It makes a lot more sense to me that ~the powers that be~ just got pissed about their star columnist giving this huge scoop + traffic driver + hard news cred (something ELLE has been building up for a while) away to another outlet. That, plus the fact that there is just not a lot of money to pay $5.5 a word anymore??
But who knows!! If ELLE did get spooked by the bad publicity, then this is a ghastly betrayal of women everywhere. If they’re just making a really poorly-timed decision, then, yikes, this is pretty unfortunate for everyone involved.
None of this is to say I have any more insight into glossy mag executive decision-making than anyone else (um if I did, I would be cashing in my big fat ~glory days~ book advance right now); I’m just saying you should def read the whole article to the end. And then tell me what you think!!
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