What Happened Between E. Jean Carroll and Elle Magazine?
Her contract was terminated early, but the fashion magazine maintains it wasn’t because of her allegations against President Trump.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/style/ejean-carroll-fired-elle.amp.html
In response to a list of questions sent by The New York Times, a Hearst spokeswoman emailed a statement. “E. Jean Carroll was long a beloved voice in the pages of Elle, the decision not to renew her contract was a business decision and had nothing to do with politics,” it said.
More than a dozen current and former Hearst employees, who spoke to The Times anonymously for fear they would face repercussions in their jobs, attributed Ms. Carroll’s contract termination, at least in part, to a steep paycheck and a break in convention: Ms. Carroll had given away the news-breaking excerpt from her book to New York magazine — not Elle. (The New York cover story, “Hideous Men,” was edited by Laurie Abraham, one of Ms. Carroll’s former editors at Elle. Ms. Abraham now works at The Atlantic.)
Some said that Ms. Carroll’s contention that Mr. Trump’s insults cost her the columnist job was self-serving, since her defamation lawsuit against him will require her to prove she has been damaged by his remarks.
But the days of lucrative magazine contracts are largely a thing of the past. When Ms. Garcia took over Elle, Ms. Carroll was being paid $120,000 a year for 12 columns of about 1,800 words each. (At about $5.50 per word, that was more than twice the $2 per word usually paid to Elle’s freelance writers for the print magazine.)
By the time Ms. Carroll was deciding where to excerpt her book — and publish her accusation that the sitting president had raped her years before — Ms. Carroll didn’t consider Elle.
That decision was revealed to Elle editors over drinks at the Russian Tea Room last spring, where Ms. Carroll and a few of the editors had gone to celebrate the upcoming publication of her book. It was there that she told the editors what the book was about — including what she had written about Mr. Trump — and that an excerpt containing this revelation would be running in New York magazine.
“They were extremely disappointed,” Ms. Carroll said of the Elle editors.
They told Ms. Carroll that they were shocked, both by what she said had happened to her and by the fact that she had not given Elle first dibs on the excerpt.