A love letter from “Secret Admirer Donald J. Trump” begging for forgiveness and cash was sent to a woman whom the president was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming.
E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, shared the unsolicited Valentine’s Day communication she received from the Trump team’s fundraising department on Saturday.
“I sent you a LOVE LETTER but I haven’t heard back. It’s Valentine’s Day E Jean!” the email reads. “I love you, and I was pretty sure you loved me back! Is everything Okay?”
The correspondence is part of an automated email campaign that has been flooding inboxes in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day.
“Yes. This is a real email. No. I did not sign up on this mailing list. Yes. We are living in a crazy world,” Carroll, 82, wrote on X in response to receiving the message, with a screenshot of the message attached.
It is unclear how Carroll ended up receiving one of these fundraising emails.
In May 2023, a federal jury found Trump, 79, liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll following an incident in the 1990s.
Carroll testified that she ran into Trump at Bergdorf Goodman, a department store in New York, in the mid-1990s. She said that Trump sexually assaulted her in the store’s dressing rooms. She first detailed the incident in a 2019 New York magazine essay that would also appear in her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.
A series of court cases resulted in juries ordering Trump to pay Carroll $88.3 million, much of which was for defaming her. Trump claimed that he had never met Carroll despite photographic evidence from the late 80s that proves otherwise. The president has denied the author’s allegations, including by stating Carroll was “not my type,” and that the case was a “witch hunt.”
Carroll has yet to see any of the money owed to her as Trump continues to appeal the decision. The Supreme Court is scheduled to discuss whether it will hear the case as soon as later this month.
Carroll was not the only one to receive these Trump fundraising communiques. Journalist Jeremy Schulman describes getting dozens of similar messages, almost hourly, while Meidas News contributor J.D. Wolf describes his experience with the emails as “creepy.”
“The email reads less like a political appeal and more like a clingy ex who just discovered Mailchimp, pressing recipients to reassure Trump that they still love him and ‘our great movement’ by handing over their cash,” Wolf writes.
It’s not the only uncomfortable Valentine’s Day message sent by the MAGA-verse. Trump’s team made the most of the romantic date by flooding social media with cringy posts, including ones riffing on the illegal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and the deportation of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The best photo the White House could find of Trump and Melania together was a black-and-white image of Trump scowling at the camera, which they shared in a more traditional holiday greeting. That post, however, was overrun with replies taunting the president about the Epstein files.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
