Making Trump Pay with E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan

“Not my type” is what President Donald Trump said about writer and former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman. Despite his denials, in 2023, a jury found Trump liable for assault and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. After he continued to defame her — leading his supporters to launch an avalanche of threats against her — a second jury in 2024 awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages. Kara talks to Carroll and her lead attorney, civil rights lawyer Roberta Kaplan, about the two civil lawsuits Carroll details in her new memoir, “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.” They discuss potential evidence left out of the trial, including connections to Jeffrey Epstein, where Trump’s appeals stand, what chance he might have of bringing the cases to the Supreme Court and what impact his attempts to silence lawyers could have on our legal system. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  Hi, E. Jean. I don't think we've met.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Oh, you two are gonna like each other. I can't wait to hear the Adam Becker thing. I plan on being very scared after I hear your podcast.

• 0:21Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guests today are writer, former advice columnist, and renowned Donald Trump ass kicker E. Jean Carroll and her attorney, the formidable Robbie Kaplan. They're here to talk about Carroll's new memoir, Not My Type: One Woman Versus a President. As you may remember, "Not My Type" is what Donald Trump said about E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the New York City department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in 1996. At the time, she was a well-known advice columnist for Elle magazine with her own TV show, Ask E. Jean, and had written a couple of books, including a biography of Hunter S. Thompson. She was something of a gonzo journalist herself. Carroll told two friends,

• 1:06Kara Swisher?

  but otherwise, she didn't talk about what happened in that dressing room until 2019. Then she hooked up with legendary attorney Kaplan, a legal powerhouse who defended U.S. versus Windsor, the Supreme Court case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and won a $26 million verdict against the violent neo-Nazis from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Together, they took on Trump, and in 2023, a jury found him liable for having sexually abused Carroll and for disfaming her. To be clear, "Not My Type" was not even close to the worst thing he'd said. The jurors awarded her $5 million. And then, Trump kept joking about it and calling her names, and she got death threats from his acolytes.

• 1:50Kara Swisher?

  So she sued him again and won again. In 2024, a different jury awarded her $83.3 million in damages.

• 1:58Kara Swisher?

  I want to talk to Carolyn Kaplan about the trials and tribulations in Carol's memoir. I really thought it was a really interesting book. She's very honest about herself and her mistakes. And at the same time, she's gone through a harrowing process that has resulted in victory. And she's surprisingly, I guess, I don't know, funny, entertaining about what's happened. I also want to hear about how they've been standing up to Trump's appeals and what their plans are if the cases go to the Supreme Court. Yes, folks, this could go to the Supreme Court. Our expert question today comes from writer Lisa Bernbach, author of the 1980s classic, The Official Preppy Handbook.

• 2:48Speaker 02

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• 4:34Kara Swisher?

  So, E. Jean and Robbie, thanks for coming on for a conflab. E. Jean, you use that word "conflab" a lot in Ask E. Jean. You call your readers "conflabians."

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:45Kara Swisher?

  What makes for a good conflab? And can we have one about President Donald Trump, a hideous man, as you've called him?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Well, this today is a marvelous conflab because it contains wit. It contains women of various opinions. It contains people who are smart and want everybody to get off their lazy asses and do something about what's happening right now in the country.

• 5:11Kara Swisher?

  Why "conflab"? What does "conflab" come from?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I don't know. "Confab," of course, is the correct word.

• 5:19Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  "Conflab" because if people are going to fat shame, we are going to control that word and we're going to turn it into something wonderful. "Conflab." Boom.

• 5:29Kara Swisher?

  Okay. All right, Robbie. Are you ready for a flab? I'm totally... She's been my client now for years, so I'm completely ready for it. All right. So, let's start. Let's start talking about your new memoir, Not My Type. Very funny, surprisingly funny. I didn't think I'd laugh so much about something so terrible. Thank you. It's about you preparing for and then sitting through two trials against Donald Trump, one for sexual abuse and defamation, the other for defamations that have led you to being threatened, harassed, etc. Pretty heavy stuff. But you've described it as high comedy, and again, the book is funny. I think it's because of you. You've been a funny writer. I've followed you for many years. So, talk a little bit about "Laugh Even When You Want to Cry," rah-rah cheerleader writing style. Where do you think that comes from? And why did you do it this way?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Kara, I had court transcripts, court transcripts. So when people read the book and they say, "That's so absurd, that's so funny." What it was, it's real. It's what actually happened. You've been inside of many courtrooms. You understand.

• 6:32Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  There is no normal conversation going on. It's all heightened conversation and dramatic. And the presentations, people are trying to persuade one another. I was surrounded with a group of characters, straight out of Jonathan Swift. I mean, it was, I, as a journalist, at the end of every night trial, I'd go back and I would put notes into my phone. I was flabbergasted. Thank God I got those details down. And it just turned out to be funny.

• 7:12Kara Swisher?

  Except you are the main character. You know, and usually when you're a journalist, you're watching other people. You're, you're not the person in the scene itself.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  No, this, this time, it was all about a tragic attack. And all the characters that I found so funny were surrounding to either argue that this attack happened, or this attack is a totally made up thing because I'm a gold digger, I'm a slut, I'm out to help the Democrats get elected, I'm a dangerous woman. And Robbie's role was to convince the jury. I was none of those things. So it was an interesting situation. And watching Robbie take hold of the, the lectern to address the jury was like watching

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Alexander the Great land in Persia.

• 8:08Kara Swisher?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  The woman. Have you ever heard Robbie argue in court?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Brilliant. Fact after fact after fact after fact. She is a sensation. And just this tiny woman. And she drove Donald Trump so insane, Kara, that in her final argument in the trial, when Trump was sitting, listening, final argument, he stood up, turning vermilion with like steam coming out of his nostrils and his ears, like his hair had swelled to twice its size because of the fire in his brain, and walked out of court. And it was so insane because that's what a guilty man does.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Guilty man stands up and runs out of court, right? If you haven't done it.

• 9:04Kara Swisher?

  Right, sure.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  You sit there and you say, this is ridiculous. If you're guilty, you just turn tail. And of course, we won the minute he stood up and walked out.

• 9:14Kara Swisher?

  Right. So Robbie, we talked about this when you came on in 2024. How did you look at it? Because there is a comic element to this tragedy, obviously. And then there's gallows humor. When you're in court like that, the ridiculousness of it is so apparent, right? And at the same time, it's dead serious. Talk a little bit about how you handled that, Robbie.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  So, you know, that is true in almost every case. It obviously was much more dramatically true here. And in a lot of ways, a case or certainly a trial is like a play. This you see in all this, in a lot of the litigation versus the Trump administration right now. Everyone knows, including the judge and the lawyers, what's really going on. But because of these time-worn and frankly effective rules of how to present evidence in court and how to make arguments and decorum and all those things, there's always two levels going on. And it's very important, I think E. Jean and I make a pretty good Mutton Jeff that way, or Abbott and Costello, whoever you want to say, because E. Jean, you know, my

• 10:19Speaker 05

  strategy with my teammates was, you guys, we just have to let E. Jean be E. Jean. We're not turning E. Jean into a yes, no witness, that's not who she is, she won't be believable if she tries to do that, and she is who she is. And I think the jury clearly, certainly the judge, and I think also the jury, was charmed, as 99.9% of the population are when they meet E. Jean. So that was E. Jean, and then I was there kind of being the straight guy, for lack of a better term, and kind of just making the arguments as simply as I could, and applying legal principles, and you have this guy getting up like a teenager, really. I mean, my son, who's 19, is more mature than that, getting up and storming out. And when that happened, I remember thinking to myself, okay, you just lost another $10

• 11:03Speaker 05

  million. That was my thought process as I was continuing to give my closing argument. Explain, as a lawyer. It was so contemptuous of the court and the judge's authority, and so disrespectful to me, that the jury, which had already spent days listening to the horrendous threats E. Jean receives almost every day, which I had categorized by type of violence. So I think we started with rapes, that right, E? And then we went to strangling, and then we went to shooting, and then we went to disemboweling. I mean, literally, there were so many in each category, it was the best way to organize it. I'll give you another example. We were in the jury selection process, Judge Kaplan asked everyone in the room,

• 11:46Speaker 05

  all the potential jurors, I guess there were probably 100 of them in the room that day, and he said, if anyone believes that the election of 2020 was rigged, please raise your hand. No one, none of the 100 potential jurors raised their hand, but Donald Trump did, he likes that, they're in the middle, like that. So it was...

• 12:05Speaker 01

  The irony and the sense of comedy in this particular case was very, very strong.

• 12:12Kara Swisher?

  So, E.G., I want to play you this section of your book where you describe how you started pitching stories to magazines when you were 12 and didn't get your first story except until you were 37. Here it is.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Can you imagine the relentless, insane, glorious, hot, blistering, beat yourself up, plow ahead, never say die enthusiasm that drives a woman to go on and on and on through a blizzard of blunt editors' numbing nose for 25 years?

• 12:49Kara Swisher?

  That's really funny. I had the same thing. I actually saved the letters of all the rejections I got from newspapers.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Oh, Cara.

• 12:58Kara Swisher?

  And at one point, I did, you know, they were always on that onion skin paper.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:01Kara Swisher?

  If I'm that old. And one editor came up to me, he said, "You're the kind of people we should have hired when you were, you know, young. You're the kind of person..." I go, "I have an email from..." I mean, not an email, "I have a letter from you."

• 13:10Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 13:11Kara Swisher?

  And I pulled it out, like, "Here you go. You rejected me and quite rudely."

• 13:14Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 13:15Kara Swisher?

  But that's fine." And he's like, "I'm an idiot." And I go, "You're an idiot." But that's okay. But you say that it's a never-stop attitude that leads you to say yes to shopping with Donald Trump and Bergdorf Goodman in 1996, despite a number of bad experiences with hideous men throughout your life. Looking back, talk about that. Were you naive or did you think a calculated risk that went sour? I mean, you've done a lot of crazy things. You took drugs with Hunter S. Thompson, for example, and that, to me, is like a pretty risky thing to do. But talk, maybe less risky than this, talk a little bit about that attitude that you had then and maybe even now.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Well, Cara, as you know, the great moment in your life is getting on an airplane, snapping that seatbelt across your lap, flying off to go do a story about somebody you've never met, in a place you've never been.

• 14:03Kara Swisher?

  Yep.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  That is exciting. You're after the story, after the story. There was no way in hell I was not going to go shopping with Donald Trump when he said, "Hey, you're that advice lady. Come help me buy a gift." I mean, I just thought I died and went to heaven. This is what I, this is my purpose in life, to help people, you know, to advise them. And Donald Trump at the time was not like the Donald Trump of today. He was, you know, the man about town. Yes, he was a hustler. Yes, but it looked like a lark to me. Also, it reminded me of a sketch I had written on Saturday Night Live. There was no way in hell.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And also, we were hav- I was flirting my brains out with him. Correct. He was being very funny. It was light. It was funny. It was joshing. It was witty. And then it just turned dark. Laura Miller at Slate said, "This is exactly what Donald Trump did to the country. We all laughed at him. We all said he was a clown. We all said he was absolutely an empty suit and laughed our asses off." And then boom, it turned dark.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  It's interesting. So I'm not the only one, you know?

• 15:32Kara Swisher?

  No, no, no. A lot of, I, I think there's not a woman who hasn't had that experience with a person. Right? Everybody has a version of that somewhere. And it's always a, people don't realize how much of a surprise it is, actually. Even, even I have been surprised, like, and you don't see it coming, right? Kind of thing in a lot of ways, which is.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:49Kara Swisher?

  So Robbie, you came on the show in February 2024, shortly after you won the second defamation trial and the jury awarded E. Jean 83.3 million in damages. You said that you wanted to let E. Jean be herself, but you had to make sure the jury didn't believe Trump when he said that she was not his type. Talk about how your team prepared E. Jean for the trial, including hair and outfits, because you, you know, and E. Jean, you said you needed to seem fuckable, right? I mean, that's, that's what you yourself said.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Key, gotta be fuckable or the jury will not believe me, because Robbie ran a mock trial beforehand and all the jurors agreed that we were, yes, two people could be in a Bergdorf dressing room, yes, two people could be in the dressing room, something sexual had happened, and yes, Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll were the two people in the dressing room. But E. Jean Carroll was too much of a dislocated crone. To believe anything but that I was begging him for it. So Robbie has a plan.

• 16:48Kara Swisher?

  Okay, Robbie, let's hear about that.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  So I think we did two things in prep. One, at kind of a surface level and one more serious. At the surface level, you're hearing how E. Jean speaks. She signs a lot of her emails ravishing regards. It was very important to me, while I didn't want to cage her in any way, I wanted E. Jean to be able to be E. Jean. I didn't want her, I think the rule I set is no words greater than three syllables.

• 17:15Kara Swisher?

  Right, okay.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  I was worried that she would speak in a language that the jury, some of the jury might understand, but some might not, and that that would be off putting to the jurors. And that just took, frankly, just a lot of prep sessions where we would go through it with her over and over again, and by the end, she was actually phenomenal at it. And I knew in cross she would be great, because when Joe Tacopina, or then Alina Habacroster, that's when she was really in her element. And it's often easier to answer questions with a hostile questioner than it is to kind of tell your story, especially this kind of story on direct. The more fundamental issue, which also came out of the mock jury exercises, was that

• 18:00Speaker 05

  E. Jean, as you can again tell, is very, has a very hard time, understandably so, given her history and her background of admitting any weakness. And so she had a very hard time even saying how what Donald Trump had done to her had irreparably damaged her life. And just so there's no mystery about that, E. Jean was never able to date again, after they happened, and there are psychological reasons that explain that. But she had a very hard time coming to terms with that. And so on that, we did a couple of things. One, probably the smartest thing we did is we hired this phenomenal expert witness psychologist

• 18:42Speaker 05

  out of California, who was one of the people who developed trauma theory back when they were using it with Vietnam veterans, and really knows this area really well. And she spent, how many hours with you?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Twenty-six hours, locked in a room. I'd never been to a therapist. Can you imagine the hideousness?

• 18:59Kara Swisher?

  Wow, I can't. I've never been to one myself, but go ahead.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Kara. Trust me, don't do it, really. I won't, don't worry, not happening. Well, I learned after the end of 26 hours, my stomach was killing me because I learned that I had given up everything erotic and romantic in my life just because of this attack. She put everything together for me, and it made me sick to my stomach, it made me sick. So you did that in order to what?

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Because during the jury exercises, particularly the women jurors, really did not like when E. Jean said or suggested in any way that she was not a victim.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  Not only did they not like it, they hated it. And the reason is, is because I assume some of them had prior incidents themselves, and certainly all of them knew other women who'd experienced this. So it was very important that E. Jean not only say it, but say it in a way that was believable. And in order to that, she had to believe it. So a lot of shrink time with a phenomenal psychologist, Hesha Zabowicz, got us that. Then, as we were preparing for the second trial, remember, the first trial Donald Trump didn't show up. The second trial, we all believed he would show up. And we knew that it would be the first time that E. would see him since 1996, since the spring of 1996 when this happened.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  And as we were doing, kind of prepping the outline and going through the questioning, it was about two days before, it was the weekend, as I recall, E. E. Jean lost the ability to speak, which, again, for E. Jean is quite dramatic because she's phenomenal at speaking. And she literally couldn't answer the questions. She had a hard time coming up with words and forming sentences. So I had already suggested that maybe the psychologist should be there for the second trial. E. Jean thoroughly rejected that suggestion on my part. But when we had this session where she was having a really hard time speaking, I said, "Look, I really think you need to talk to the psychologist again." And she did, and she came, they came up with a strategy for how she would confront Donald Trump when she saw him.

• 21:03Kara Swisher?

  The issue of how to be a victim is very hard for women, right? Because there's downsides to both parts. If you're too strong, it's a problem. If you're too weak, it's a problem, correct?

• 21:13Speaker 05

  Exactly. And here's this woman who lived her life 25 years submitting stories, goes to live, believe it or not, with Hunter S. Thompson at Aspen. She was fearless. And so she had a very hard time, I probably would too, of acknowledging the really fundamental damage that this incident had done to her.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Also, I was worried that with the women on the jury, I didn't know what they'd been through. And, you know, just complain that some man jammed his fingers in you may be nothing compared to the trauma they had. So it was, I never want to say I'm feeling bad because I don't want anybody else

• 21:50Kara Swisher?

  Right, that's a good point.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  to feel bad when they hear that I'm feeling bad. It was hard.

• 21:54Kara Swisher?

  It's very Indiana. It's very Midwestern Indiana. The book is a pastiche of memory, stories from your past, court records, and mixed in are side notes with descriptions and inner monologue. Now, some of them do pack an emotional punch, like in the middle of the transcript of your cross-examination by Trump's attorney, Joe Tacopina, who's grilling you about why you didn't scream during the attack. You write, "It's a surreal feeling being beat up by a man who is asking me to describe being beat up and assaulted by a man. He is beating me up to defend." I think it's the fear many abuse survivors have about going to court. Talk about that moment in court.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's a perfect victim, Cara. Perfect victim, never is silent, always screams, always goes to the police, always reports to the police, no matter if the guy attacks her after she goes to the police, no matter if he tears apart her reputation, perfect victim always goes to the police. And here's the thing, perfect victim just goes back to her cave and covers herself with a dishcloth, never smiles again, never goes to a party, never laughs, never does anything. But mainly, she screams.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And Joe Tacopina, straight out of the 16th century, could not believe that I didn't scream. What I had done was I had laughed.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  And boy, did he make a big deal out of that. Just, I mean, Robbie had arguments against it. She laughed. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, she laughed. Of course I laughed because of course in an erotic situation, what you do is you laugh at a man to, you know, it sort of calms things down. But being questioned about it, it just pissed me off because he was trying to knock me down, just trying to knock me down.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So, man.

• 23:51Kara Swisher?

  Which is his job, to be fair. This is his job to do so.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  No, he's an excellent, excellent defense attorney. Let me tell you, Joe Tacopina is one of the best. But the thing where I did break down on the stand was our own great attorney, Mark Ferrara, asked me this question. Are you sorry that you've gone to trial, E. G.? And that did it. Hot blazing tears behind my eyes.

• 24:20Kara Swisher?

  That's when you cried.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  It was.

• 24:22Kara Swisher?

  Why?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Because I just hated Donald Trump so much and they just came gushing down my face.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 24:44Speaker 02

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• 25:28Kara Swisher?

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• 27:48Kara Swisher?

  There are three chapters in the book about evidence you did not or could not introduce, including evidence related to Jeffrey Epstein, who obviously has been in the news a lot recently. Robbie, explain why you didn't want to introduce it as evidence. And what do you both think about Trump and AG Pam Bondi saying there's no Epstein list? Let's start with you, Robbie, and then E. Gene.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  I mean, the main reason is I don't think Judge Kaplan would ever have let it in. And we need, you know, one of the most important things when your court is having credibility with the court and not making arguments that he's going to be disdainful of. So I just thought under the rules of evidence that there's no way he would let that in, and I didn't even try. There was other stuff that I did try that he didn't let in. For example, Trump wrote a book, and one of his books he wrote, he suggested going to Bergdorf Goodman to buy gifts, and he had denied that he ever went to Bergdorf Goodman. And the judge wouldn't even let that in. And the argument was, well, Takapina said, well, he didn't write it. And we were like, what do you mean? The copyright's in his name. What do you mean he didn't write it?

• 28:51Speaker 05

  But I think Judge Kaplan was thinking at that point, you know, we had what we had, and he wasn't going to add anything into the case.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Kara, Robbie's not telling you something.

• 28:59Kara Swisher?

  Oh, OK, all right.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  When the Epstein stuff came in, it was in Michael Wolff's book, and he had a tape recording. He had hundreds of hours of Jeffrey Epstein on tape. Robbie's so calm here. At the time, she was Jeffrey Epstein. In 1996, shortly after the attack in Bergdorf, running into Trump on the street, and Trump, quote, regaling him with the, quote, torrid details of what happened in Bergdorf, Robbie was dying to get this into court, but...

• 29:31Kara Swisher?

  All right, talk about that, Robbie.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it would have been great evidence, but under the rules of evidence, I couldn't get it in. It was hearsay.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  He was dead.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  It wasn't necessarily all that reliable. I mean, there are all these strict rules of evidence, which is why we won the case in the first place, because these rules generally are good. But they limit the kinds of evidence that may not be as reliable as other kinds of evidence. And I just knew I had no chance in hell with Judge Kaplan on that.

• 29:57Kara Swisher?

  So first, you, Robbie. What did you think of what's happening right now? And then, E. Gene?

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Look, you know...

• 30:04Speaker 05

  What's always been most astounding to me about Jeffrey Epstein is that it happened in plain sight, right? He wasn't hiding in some upstate cabin somewhere where he was doing this. He was in a townhouse.

• 30:18Kara Swisher?

  In the middle of Manhattan.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  In the Upper East Side of Manhattan that people would come to all the time.

• 30:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, you know, I don't know whether you call it a client list. I doubt he even called it a client list. But there's no question that there were a number of other people. He wasn't the only person engaged in the kind of misconduct he was engaged in with. That wouldn't have made any sense. I mean, I just would be shocked if that were true. And so, look, I don't know what's going on, and I don't know who's on the list and who's not on the list. But it was obviously a grave miscalculation on the president's part to kind of trumpet this all these years and then become president and need to squash it.

• 30:57Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, absolutely. He trained them up in QAnon, and now he's saying, "Please don't behave the way I've trained you," which is interesting. What about you, E. Gene? How do you look at it?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Well, I interviewed Jill Harth in Vanity Fair, and she was running a beauty contest back in the day, in the 90s, actually. And she was in Mar-a-Lago, and she's got all her beauty contestants there. She brings Jeffrey Epstein. He brings, Trump brings his best friend Jeffrey Epstein with him to meet all these beauty contestants. They lived, I don't know why people don't talk about this, back in the day, very close to each other in Florida, very close. Jill sort of led me to believe walking distance. I don't know if that makes sense, but maybe to a New Yorker it does. But there's Trump running over with Jeffrey Epstein to meet the girls.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Ignorant, had not been around money or even out of their home states at the time. I mean, total prey.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Horrible, you know, horrible. One of Epstein's selling points, as I understand it to people, was that he was really good at saving people on taxes.

• 32:07Kara Swisher?

  Yes, that was one of them.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  Right, saving taxes. So I can't imagine that that wasn't attractive to Donald Trump.

• 32:12Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, probably more attractive. That's probably the most attractive thing. It's interesting. At the time, I think a lot of people did know what was happening, especially after the Florida settlement. I had been invited to his house for one of those dinners. You remember, he invited well-known people and he was particularly fixated on tech. And the person, his representative, said, oh, Jeffrey would really like you to come. And I said, I don't dine with pedophiles. I'm sorry.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  Bravo.

• 32:35Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. And they were like, well, it was, you know, I was like, I just, no, it's not happening in this life or the next.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Wow, love it.

• 32:42Kara Swisher?

  Which was interesting, because a lot of people did, a lot of journalists did, that's for sure. So let's go back to the trials really quickly. The juries came back quickly. How surprising was that? Both of you, talk about the moment the $83 million verdict came down. Robbie, you first, on why it came back so quickly, and then E. Jean.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  So both of them came back very quickly. It was under three hours for both, which is shockingly fast for almost any case. The first case, we had a much tougher jury. We had this guy who's a Tim Poole, who got all this news from Tim Poole's podcast, and we couldn't get off the jury. And it had to be unanimous, so he had to vote with us. So I thought that was going to take longer.

• 33:22Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  And the second jury was more, there were people from New York City, so I thought it was a more sympathetic jury. But I was actually, I mean, two things. One, I thought they were going to issue punitive damages that were going to be hefty. You know, I wasn't expecting, honestly, the number as high as we got, which is really only 3.6 times the compensatory, so it's well within constitutional limits. But I was surprised by that, and I think the reason for it was Donald Trump's own behavior in the courtroom. It's a really bad idea if you're fighting a period of damages claim to act like you're contemptuous of the court in the courtroom, and they saw that every day.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  He would come in in the morning, he'd sit through court, make lots of nasty comments, make, you know, huffing and puffing and derisive comments, and then he'd leave and he'd go to, I think it was Trump Tower, somewhere downtown, and they would do a press conference that he would videotape, in which he continued to defame E. Jean. So like, imagine what a case this was for us. I got to say to the jury, not only do you need to give enough money to make him stop, he continued to do it through this very trial, and we showed all the videos. So, so in retrospect, that all makes sense.

• 34:36Kara Swisher?

  E. Jean, what about you? Were you surprised by the speed and also the money?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  When the jury goes out, we had a Manhattan jury for the second trial, we had an upstate jury for the first trial, that came from Trump counties, that we won the first trial was a real achievement, because that was not Manhattan, those were upstate red counties. This jury, she stands up, the judge says, do you have a verdict? The forewoman stands up, she says, we do you, and he says, hand it to Andy the clerk. Andy the clerk opens it, starts to read it, cocks his head, frowns, goes like this, hands it up to the judge. Judge Kaplan looks at it, his eyebrows rise, and he says, Madam forewoman, what does the "M" mean?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  And just, Robbie was on this side of me, we were holding hands, and Sean G. Crowley was on this side, we floated up to the ceiling. Because I'm gonna be given away. That 83.3 million to everything Donald Trump hates.

• 35:46Kara Swisher?

  Once you get it, we'll get to that in a second.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:48Kara Swisher?

  I think you.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Oh, Robbie's gonna, we're gonna get it. No, we're gonna get it, totally.

• 35:53Kara Swisher?

  So first, before that, every week we get to a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

• 35:58Speaker 06

  Hi, it's Lisa Bernbach of the Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep. I've met Donald Trump, and I have this question for you all. Why do American women vote for him? Why do they support him? He is a bully. He has only contempt for women. He claims he can grab us whenever he wants, wherever he wants. And yet, women, not all women, find him charming, amusing. He tells it like it is. But yet, he votes against all of our interests and has taken away so many of our rights. So what's in it?

• 36:38Kara Swisher?

  For transparency, Lisa is one of two people E. Jean told about the assault right after it happened in 1996. She testified on E. Jean's behalf. But to her point, were you surprised that Trump won the 2024 election? First you, E. Jean, and then you, Robbie.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I was surprised and not surprised. It's just that they don't know it. They don't, we live in a Berlin Wall. On this side is all the liberals, on this side is the conservatives. They didn't hear the news. They just didn't hear it. How, their Facebook feeds don't give them that kind of information. After he was voted president, the news that he lost in the United States Court of Appeals to Robbie on his trying to overturn the, that was the first time many people in this country heard he had been found liable for sexual abuse, only when Robbie beat him in the appeals court. So it's not really women's fault.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  They just didn't know it in the number of people that we needed to know it.

• 37:44Kara Swisher?

  What about you, Robbie?

• 37:46Speaker 05

  I agree, and I think it's due to a lot of other factors that are somewhat unrelated. One, and I know you focus on this, Cara, the rise of disinformation and misinformation on the internet. I mean, people were probably getting access to Alina Haba's videos, but not to any like real news about what had happened at the case. And two, there's obviously this incredible resentment, obviously, in our society of certain very large segments now, and that Donald Trump appeals to that, because Donald Trump himself is very resentful, and he can channel that in ways that-

• 38:21Kara Swisher?

  So the grievance industrial complex.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, in ways that no one has been able to do.

• 38:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, one of the things that's interesting is, you know, he is funny, like you just said at the beginning. I watched all the apprentices. I was like, he's very good at social media, and to pretend he's not is kind of silly on our part. And I was saying, this is not an excuse, this is an explanation. I'm explaining. And I have to tell you, the one thing that really, it didn't surprise me, but much on the left was like, how dare you say that? I'm like, it's factual. The man is really good at social media. And if you pretend he's not, you know, he's loathsome, he's not good. I'm like, no, he's good, he's also loathsome. It's very hard for people to do that. And so I do think a lot of people miss that, especially with women, because he has an appeal that is hard to understand and yet is obvious, to me at least.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  You were trying to get him that day at Bergdorf until you got to the dressing room and he pounced, right?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  No, he's like, you know, I'm gonna say something that's gonna cause fire to be lit across the Kara Swisher universe. But to me, he's one of the great geniuses of the 21st century. Not only is the country falling, people, people all around the globe, he has set off a firestorm around the globe, this conservative backlash. Women in this country, half of us have been put 50 years behind. This is Donald Trump. He is smarter than any of us give him credit for. And we gotta do what Kara just said, we gotta realize he is a genius at social media. And he only thinks of himself- And therefore, everybody around him only think of him.

• 39:53Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, right.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  And that is what we're dealing with.

• 39:56Kara Swisher?

  And all the great demagogues have been good, whether it from Hitler to Huey Long to everybody else. And whether you like their, but it doesn't seem to, doesn't matter. It does matter, but it doesn't matter. So it's not over yet. Obviously, Trump appealed both cases, but you've had new wins in recent weeks, including the court blocking Trump's attempts to get the Department of Justice involved in the case because he's now president.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  For the third time, so you understand.

• 40:19Kara Swisher?

  They're trying to wear you down presumably, but can you say things where things stand in the appeals process? Where is the money now? And, and the $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict, the only option Trump has left is to take the case to the Supreme Court. In 2024, you told me you didn't think he had any federal issues, that the Supreme Court could legitimately take it. But his new claim is that he has presidential immunity. When he made those defamatory comments about E. Jean, you've won a case before the Supreme Court, US versus Windsor, which was a landmark gay marriage case. You may be arguing that again soon. But it was a different court at a different time. So talk about where we are from a legal point of view with this claim.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  So on the first verdict, which is kind of the cornerstone of everything, because that's the underlying sexual abuse verdict, the money, Trump, believe it or not, I've never seen anyone do this before, but they deposited the $5 million plus with the court. I've been doing commercial litigation in the Southern District for eons at this point, and I've never seen a defendant just deposit the money with the court. I don't know what the reason was. I don't know why they didn't just take out a bond, which is what he did for the bigger verdict. But they didn't. So you're right, that case, they're going to try to, they told us they're going to try to take to the Supreme Court. The main issue, there's no issue really of presidential immunity there, because when he made that statement, he wasn't president. And obviously, when he assaulted E. Jean, he wasn't president.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Their main argument at the Second Circuit, and I think they'll try it at SCOTUS, is this argument that we admitted the testimony of Jessica Leeds, who was on a plane in 1979 when Trump, she got bumped up to first class. It's the same pattern. They were making polite chit chat, and then all of a sudden, he kind of pounced. The other, Natasha Stoinoff, who was a People Magazine reporter who came to Mar-a-Lago right after, right before Barron was born, as I recall. So that would be. Probably oh five, I think, or late oh five. And she also, he brought her into a room and kind of did the whole pouncing thing with her. And their main argument was kind of ridiculous. Their main argument was really about Jessica Leeds.

• 42:24Speaker 05

  And it was this argument that because she was on a plane and you didn't know what state they were flying over when this happened, that it wasn't necessarily a federal crime. Then you couldn't admit it under the rule of evidence that allows prior bad acts to come in when it's a case of sexual assault. In most circumstances, they don't come in. The problem with that argument is, as I said in my, in my argument at the court, is it was too many lawyers trying to screw in a light bulb because it was a crime in 1979 to do what Donald Trump did to Jessica Leeds. It was just a different crime. Even if the Supreme Court thought there was any doubt there, it's not what's called a SCOTUS-worthy issue. It just isn't. There's no split between the circuits.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  There's no big deal. And we have so much other evidence that came in, as the court concluded it one who made a difference anyway. The big verdict- The 83 million? Is in a different position. So there, we have argued it, they, they raised two issues. They raised this Westfall Act claim, which is how they got the case to federal court at the very beginning, and he's now trying to reassert that for the third time. And they raised the underlying claim of presidential immunity. They're related claims, but they're under separate legal doctrines. That, I argued, before the circuit, three weeks ago.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And she killed. It was like King Henry at Agincourt. It was unbelievable. Really.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  I thought that was Alexander the Great. What happened to Alexander the Great? Now you're king. Now you're the king in Agincourt. So I think that argument went well. As you noted, they've already rejected the Westfall Act argument because that they made in a different route to the Second Circuit. I think they're going to reject the presidential immunity argument because he waived it in this case. At the very beginning of the case, when we were still in state court, the other side submitted a letter that literally said to the state court judge, no one is seeking to escape accountability here. E. Jean can, can pursue her claims when he is no longer president. If that's not a waiver of presidential immunity, I'm not sure what is.

• 44:26Kara Swisher?

  So if it gets to the Supreme Court, what is the, do you have, you think it has a chance of getting there? This is a different court, a different time.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  I think it certainly has a better chance than the $5 million, which I think has very low chances. On the second claim, I think if you're the justices, you have to be thinking to yourselves, is this really

• 44:46Kara Swisher?

  The best use of our time.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  the factual scenario where we want to deal with presidential immunity again?

• 44:51Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, right.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  And my guess is most of them, for most of them, the answer to that question will be no.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 45:12Speaker 07

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• 46:24Speaker 04

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• 46:54Speaker 08

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 47:21Kara Swisher?

  So Robbie, President Trump separately has been targeting law, big law firms. You have a new law firm, but many of them have struck deals with Trump administration to avoid being penalized. So far, at least nine firms have promised pro bono work for Trump support initiatives totaling $1 billion. Many lawyers are leaving those firms. You have a new hire who's done that. It's turned out a lot of these things have turned sour for the firms who had acquiesced. What happens here, including potential Trump opponents like yourselves?

• 47:50Speaker 05

  So let me say, first of all, that the first firm that did the deal with Trump was Paul Weiss, and that was the firm where I learned to be a lawyer, when I was there for over 20 years.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  She made partner before she was 30 at Paul Weiss. That's what she did.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  I paid agent to be my press agent.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm glad I'm here for this interview so I can instruct people what a brilliant mind you were at 29, 28.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  And so there were certainly tears in the culture. It wasn't perfect, but but a lot of us, certainly my generation and up at Paul Weiss, really believed in the culture and the principles that the firm had. And so this kind of this quote unquote deal that the firm did with him is just devastatingly painful to so many of us. Paul Weiss was was known for litigation practice. That's what people came to Paul Weiss for. That's what I did. That's the kind of work they did and for their dedication to pro bono and public interest work. It's not clear to me today that if a law firm has a big private equity M and A hedge

• 48:59Speaker 05

  fund practice, that that practice is necessarily compatible with having a truly independent litigation department. And so kind of the movement of big firm lawyers to smaller firms has been happening now for years.

• 49:14Kara Swisher?

  Just like in media.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  Exactly. And then I think this is only going to make it more pronounced because you can't have it's not even just having technical conflicts. You can't really be a litigator if you have to worry that what you say or do in a case involving a completely different client is going to irk one of your private equity guys. You just can't do it.

• 49:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you look at someone like Abby Lowell who defended Jared and Ivanka or Jared. And then you look at and he's done Hunter Biden, right? He should be able to do whoever he wants. So speaking of people who have been helpful, Eugene, LinkedIn co-founder, he's founded a lot of things. Reid Hoffman helped finance your case, someone I know very well. It might have played out differently if you hadn't had that option. One, are you worried that Trump will use that pro bono money to go after you again? And what is the prospects of that happening again, given the shift of techno? Not Reid, by any means. And I think he's probably doubled down on his beliefs in many ways. How do you think about that money and the kindness of billionaires?

• 50:13Kara Swisher?

  In this case, it benefited you, but most of the billionaires have gone to Trump's side in tech at least.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Reid Hoffman is a hero. He not only helped.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Our case, he called Robbie because he wanted to help with the Charlottesville case. When, you know, Robbie trounced the Nazis, the white supremacists, the good, the Proud Boys, he took them all down. That was it. Reid Hoffman made that possible. Then there was a little bit of money left over, and Reid called Robbie and said, "How about using that for the E. Jean Carroll case?" So, he's, listen, you don't get better than Reid Hoffman. He is fighting the billionaires who are, well, I don't need to tell you.

• 50:59Kara Swisher?

  Would you be worried about getting that now? Because a lot of them are acquiescent at this point. We're not, actually, that much.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  You know, oddly, I'm not, oddly, I think we're gonna get that 83.3 million, and I think we're gonna give it away, first of all, to help women get our rights back. Because Robbie and I have enough money, you know? We don't need more stuff. But the country is hurting right now. He's torn it apart. Democracy is hanging by a thread. And I am not worried about getting the money.

• 51:32Kara Swisher?

  I think it's gonna take a while, though.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  It's definitely gonna take a while.

• 51:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's definitely gonna take a while. He'll do everything possible to slow you down. So, and has done that. So, you're also going up against Trump with the MTA congestion pricing, and you had the Elon lawsuits. You have a lot of...

• 51:45Speaker 05

  CCDH, yeah.

• 51:47Kara Swisher?

  You're sort of the, I would say, the go-to Trump gladiator, or whatever. Talk a little bit about that, because it's a slightly dangerous role, including with tech people like Elon, although now they're on opposite sides, inevitably.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 52:00Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about that and the difficulty. I think about it all the time, right? When I'm saying things. But litigation's a little different. You're causing them financial and other harms that they consider harmful.

• 52:13Speaker 05

  You know, it's something that I think is on my wife's mind for understandable reasons all the time. In order to do what I do, I'm very good at repression. And so, I can't tell you that I, like, wake up or, you know, think in the middle of the night that I'm afraid. This is who I am and what I do. And if people like me don't fight back, if lawyers who know how to use the court system and who have judges' respect don't fight back, then who will?

• 52:44Kara Swisher?

  What are you afraid of, actually?

• 52:50Speaker 05

  You know, it's not Trump or Elon so much. It's all the people who follow them and, you know, like that poor Will Stansell, who was attacked, you know, based on Iraq. That's the people you have to worry about, kind of the nut jobs who actually believe all this QAnon craziness.

• 53:08Kara Swisher?

  Well, they're fighting with each other right now. So the ball is, the eye is off you, but do you imagine it returning once the money gets the, because he will have a fit.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do think that he is not attacking E. Jean or myself right now because he's very worried about how that will be perceived by the justices of the Supreme Court. I think that's absolutely correct.

• 53:30Kara Swisher?

  E. Jean, you're also a fighter. We've talked a little bit about your threats, the threat level you get. Talk about that and how your life has changed. Do you ever believe there will be a moment to move on? You know, Robbie had talked about sort of a moment where everything stopped for you.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Oh, listen, I don't care if they shoot me. I don't care. I'd like to get shot in the arm. I'd like to get shot, I don't want to be shot in the head and dead. I don't care. I do not care. I want everybody in the country to get off their lazy asses and walk outside, look at their neighbors. That's what I'd like people to do. We're living in, it's stupid to be afraid. Why live your life that way? I've been here 81 years and I'm not going to waste the last of it worrying about that guy in marmalade-colored makeup. It makes no sense. So that's what I'm going to do.

• 54:22Kara Swisher?

  That's what you're going to do. And when you, when this money gets to you, is there anything you're going to do for yourself?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I got, look, you can see, I got the, I got all my stuff. I don't need anything. I don't like stuff. You know what? It occurred to me, Cara, okay, shh, we won't tell anybody. I was thinking of getting a facelift. $65,000. Then I think, what do I want a fucking facelift for? $65,000.

• 54:47Kara Swisher?

  That's a lot of money.

• 54:48Speaker 05

  Well, look at your face.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Six scholarships to a community college. No, you know, if I'm sagging and bagging all over the place, good, I don't care. No, it just... I can't wait.

• 55:02Kara Swisher?

  E. Jean, you wrote about all of Robbie's superstitions. Which ones do you think are funniest? And Robbie, which ones do you believe helped you win this case and ensure that you prevail in the future?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  For me, every single one of them. No question about it.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  You know, I was on the stand for three days. Joe Tacopina cross-examined me for two straight days. After I got off the stand, we went back to the offices. And Matt Craig, who was on the car, went over and guess what he did? He opened a bottle of, oh, my God, of champagne. It may as well been a hand grenade. Robbie backed up, like, no champagne until we win. No champagne. I mean, she was terrified. And Matt just said, fuck it, I'm drinking. But Robbie wouldn't touch it. So that's.

• 55:55Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. That's the one that was funny is what, you think they all helped you, Robbie? That's very.

• 56:00Speaker 05

  Every single, look, I have no way of knowing, obviously, none of us do, what helped or what doesn't. So I believe every single one of them is necessary. I had to do it. And if we have to do another case, I will do it again.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Carol Martin got off the stand. Robbie's in the car next to me. She said, Carol Martin just won our case. And then she spits three times.

• 56:20Kara Swisher?

  Meaning?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Because God is listening to Robbie Kaplan say that Carol Martin just won the case. And God will punish Robbie Kaplan if she doesn't spit three times.

• 56:33Kara Swisher?

  I pretend to spit. I don't actually spit. Okay. My grandmother used to do that, Robbie. She was Italian.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Kara, what are you superstitious of, Kara?

• 56:42Kara Swisher?

  Nothing.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Really?

• 56:44Kara Swisher?

  I believe that. No, not at all.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  You don't wear special shoes, special socks on a special, you have a lucky outfit?

• 56:51Kara Swisher?

  Nope.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Lucky pair of jeans.

• 56:53Kara Swisher?

  Nope.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Lucky sunglasses.

• 56:55Kara Swisher?

  And when people ask me what I'm scared of, I say scary things. I don't know what to tell you. Like, most things, no, but scary things, yes. Nope, nothing. I'm not superstitious at all.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  You weren't raised Catholic, were you?

• 57:05Kara Swisher?

  I was, but I walk under ladders, I guess.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 57:08Kara Swisher?

  So, let me ask you your last question. When you, when we're in this situation, and there is, there's a feeling of spiraling out of control of the Trump people with this Epstein thing, you're seeing, you're sort of, I was telling Scott on Pivot just a second ago, you're starting to see their ass, right? You're starting to see the fractures and fissures and things like that. That said, the damage being done is vast and will continue until he either is gone or he lacks power, or, or both, or whatever. And the likelihood of it continuing, I feel, is not, is, is, is very clear that none of, no one can hold it together except him. How do, how are you looking at this moment right now? Despite your victories and everything else, how do you look at this moment?

• 57:50Speaker 05

  I just believe that my job is to keep fighting and that I, even though a lot of people would say that my cynical instincts as a lawyer are very good, at bottom, I think I'm hopeful. And I do think we will be able to turn this around. It's gonna take some time, and it's gonna take a lot of pain for a lot of people.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  This moment, Kara, I grab the joy whenever it comes on. That's how I'm looking at this moment. We have to stop being despondent and look at each other. It's called praxis. We organize. When we organize, we can change laws. That's what we need to do. I'm gonna suggest that at the end of this month, we all get together on social media and all text the same thing. I don't know, do you have a, do you have an idea what we could all text? Really, Kara?

• 58:37Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I do. This fucking guy.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 58:40Kara Swisher?

  There you go.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  May I put that on Substack?

• 58:42Kara Swisher?

  You may, please do. This fucking guy is my favorite expression for so many people.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Why don't we all get on whatever social media we have?

• 58:49Kara Swisher?

  I don't know if that'll help.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  We all publish that at the same time, the same day, at the same hour.

• 58:53Kara Swisher?

  Okay, go for it.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Like, beating the pants.

• 58:55Kara Swisher?

  This fucking guy. I say that about a lot of people, this fucking guy.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Oh, boy, I am going to quote you all over. Let's get this going, okay?

• 59:04Kara Swisher?

  All right, all right, okay, this fucking guy.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:06Kara Swisher?

  Well, yeah, well, you seem to have beaten him. Anyway, you guys-

• 59:11Speaker 01

  This is good.

• 59:11Kara Swisher?

  Thank you so much for both of you, and three spits for everybody.

• 59:15Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you, Kara, I appreciate it.

• 59:21Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kaplan Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're ready for a battle like Henry V at Agincourt. If not, pew pew pew, three spits for you, too. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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