You're Never Too Old To Get Even
The salted cantaloupe and seedless watermelon of newsletters is bowing down to the GOAT and packing our therapist in our carry-on.
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Welcome in, Spreadistas!
Three cheers for Auntie Eeeee! In New York, Jessica Bennett—a frequent chronicler of the E. Jean Carroll trials who has been embedded in our protagonist’s camp for years—delivers some of her best writing to date in a profile of the Spread’s fairy godmother, timed to the till-now top-secret1 release of E’s new book about the trials, Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.2 Bennett describes the book as a “minute-by-minute, motion-by-motion retelling of the two court cases, written in the choppy, gonzo style Carroll became known for in the 1980s.” In yesterday’s New York Times rave, Alexandra Jacobs calls it, “a trial scrapbook that is also a memoir of love and friendship, a photo party, a movie set and—though sprinkled with social media posts—a mash note to Ye Olde New Journalism.” Horrific as the book’s raison d’être may be, Jacobs says, Not My Type “tops off Carroll’s whipped-cream oeuvre like a slightly bruised but still buoyant maraschino cherry.”
That fantastical buoyancy (unfathomable even to us, a pair of acolytes who have seen it up close and personal) swerved into extra-sharp relief this week for us, thanks to a story about its polar opposite: Alexis Okeowo’s stomach-churning reporting on other women of #MeToo—those who risked life and limb, mental health, personal relationships, jobs, homes, and sanity to come forward in what was supposed to be a new era of possibility for survivors of sexual violence. And who now find themselves living in the backlash we call… 2025.
For the New Yorker3, Okeowo returns to her own home state of Alabama to track down women who accused Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, derailing his campaign for an open seat in the US Senate. You remember Moore, don’t you—the one who propositioned, dated, and grabbed so many underage girls that he was at one point banned from the local mall, yet still went on to have a thriving political career? One of the women Okeowo interviews is Leigh Corfman, who said Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two. In 2017, Corfman was mentioned in Time’s “Person of the Year” issue. Today she’s a self-described “hermit” living on food stamps. “It’s like, once the men started complaining and MAGA got involved, we can’t talk about this anymore,” she said. “This has to be swept under the rug.”
Given everything these women continue to deal with, it’s no wonder that, in an interview last year, Christine Blasey Ford said, “If I had known, I don’t think I would have jumped off the diving board.” All of which only underscores the extent of E. Jean’s heroism—and, truly, her one-of-a-kind sticktoitiveness. And reminds us why, in Bennett’s story, we find her living in her beloved Frog Cabin in the woods, surrounded by floodlights and armed with a shotgun nicknamed Aphrodite, always with “one in the chamber.”
Spreaders, E’s book came out Tuesday! We got our copies in the mail today! Do yourself a solid and order yours here at the Spread’s Bookshop.
Forever and always, you’re exactly our type,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Show us a little love and hit that ❤️ button, would ya?
Let them eat cake.
Spreaders, we were all set to make our go-to joke about Huma Abedin and Alex Soros’s Hamptons nuptials. You know, the one where we har-har-har it up about how sore our feet are from shmancing the night away with the beautiful people? Well, not this time. We don’t know how these images of the same old, same old Hollywood/DC Democratic power grid—Hillary and Kamala; Adrien Brody and Harvey’s ex—hit you, but for us, watching them all party down together, not a hair out of place in their shared snow globe of wealth and power, had us reaching for the extra strength Alka Seltzer. Yes, with human beings being disappeared by the US government, lawmakers being gunned down, and women dying for want of what should be routine health care, Camp Dem staged its ultimate power wedding with maximum elite-media visibility (Vogue) on what just happened to be Trump’s big beautiful birthday weekend, as Democratic foot soldiers took to the streets en masse in the No Kings protests. Because, you know, America doesn’t have royals. Except, looking at these pics, maybe we do? Yick.
The Enigma That Is ACB
As much as #MeToo is supposedly over, done, dead, buried, there are ways in which all roads—especially here in Spreadlandia—still seem to lead back to it. Read Jessica Bennett’s E. Jean profile, and you will be reminded that it was Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s explosive reporting on Harvey Weinstein that inspired E to expose her long-buried secret about Trump. And now Kantor—back on the Supreme Court beat—is reconsidering the woman Trump rushed onto the Supreme Court, who has made some surprising decisions. “When Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed on nonunanimous decisions this term, Justice Barrett joined them 82 percent of the time,” Kantor writes—and that’s giving Dear Leader a serious case of buyer's remorse. Look, it’s a dark day when Amy Coney Barrett is our last, best hope. But in a world short on good news, we’ll take it.
Read “How Amy Coney Barrett is Confounding the Right and the Left” here.
Titty Committee 2.0
You heard it here first: Catherine Lacey can write. OK, fine, we’re hardly the first to tout the talents of the Biography of X author, whose next sure-to-be-big release, The Möbius Book, hit shelves yesterday and who, like Parker Posey, is a fellow alum of Rachel’s childhood sleepaway camp. But in an essay about the unexpected glories of a 250-member breast-forward group chat—a text chain mostly featuring unconventional images of tits of all persuasions—she really goes for it, her delight so palpable, you can almost hear Lacey smiling through her teeth as she describes the various boobs
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