E. Jean Carroll is a prolific writer, who within her long career has written for NBC, for Playboy, and on her own doing true crime non-fiction pieces. If you put NBC, crime, and playboy into a food processor, what comes out the other end is Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
E. Jean King claims that she bumped into Donald Trump in the Bergdorf Goodman department store, where he proceeded to coax her to the lingerie section, and ultimately into a changing room where he raped her. In season 13, episode 11 of SVU, a character describes nearly exactly the same scenario, a prominent man enters the changing room while a woman is trying on lingerie in specifically the Bergdorf Goodman department store. There are a few possibilities here:
A) It's completely coincidence. Technically possible, but that is a few specifics to have accidentally overlap perfectly.
B) She pulled her story from SVU. Also technically possible, but even less likely than the first option if you ask me. A writer of all people plagiarizing a rape accusation is far fetched.
C) SVU got the story from her. Law and Order, especially Special Victims Unit, is well known for getting its stories from real world events, many episodes ripped straight from the headlines. Again, Carroll is a writer who has worked for NBC and wrote true crime stories. There is a highly plausible scenario here where she confided in someone connected to SVU who then wrote it into an episode (she had two witnesses testify on her behalf, that she told them about the event at the time, one is another writer who has worked in tv, the other is a news anchor who also worked on Dateline, she told her tv friends about it).
So, with this amount of information, you might reasonably think "well, if her exact stories were told years ago and reenacted on tv exactly as she described, that's probably corroboration for the accusation, right?" This is where the twist comes in, because the one thing that doesn't match from her claim to the SVU episode is that in SVU, it wasn't rape, it was a story of consensual, public, sexual roleplay. Well, that's just tv, that's not really evidence... but then Carroll has made a few comments in interviews since then that might raise some eyebrows. In interviews about her owned alleged rape, she rarely makes it through the story without playful comments about how fun lingerie is. She's bragged in Vanity Fair about wearing very little under a trench coat so that she could flash her professor in college. Oh, and she told Anderson Cooper on tv that "most people think of rape as sexy", and that she doesn't want to call it a rape because she wasn't "thrown to the floor and ravaged".
So a woman who probably thinks rape is sexy and has exhibitionist tendencies inspired part of an SVU episode with her story about the time she went into a public changing room with Donald Trump.
This case is a civil case. The case would disintegrate instantly in a criminal trial where the standard is proof beyond reasonable doubt, because oh boy, there's a lot of things to have reasonable doubt about here. In a civil case, the standard is "the preponderance of evidence", given the evidence presented, the jury needs only conclude the accusation is more likely than not to have happened. And the were asked if they thought it was most likely that Trump raped her, and they said "no". Not even in New York could a jury be convinced a rape even probably occurred.
Trump got convicted of this because he publicly called her a fraud until it actually became a case, and then with lawyers involved, he defended the claim that stars can just grab women by their whatever, and suggested that she liked it, which deliberately or not actively confirms the event happened (he at minimum felt her up in a public place he should not have been) and he lied publicly about it. It's not easy to prove defamation, but Trump did a good job of building the case. That being said, this woman is also a loony, and was probably disappointed that he didn't "throw her to the ground and ravish her".