'Ask E. Jean' Ivy Meeropol & Martina Radwan Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Perhaps the most striking reveal in the new documentary about the writer E. Jean Carroll is just how magnetic she is. Whether in voiceover snippets of her writing, clips of her mid-'90s talk show or interviews from the present, what shines through bright as day is her personality: curious, mischievous and candid, without pretense and also not without warmth. Her charisma may come as a surprise if, like many people in 2025, you know her mainly for being one of Donald Trump's accusers. In Ask E. Jean, now premiering at Telluride, the fact of that surprise becomes its own minor tragedy: Here is a fascinating woman in her own right, distilled in the public imagination to someone else's crime. In that sense, the Ivy Meeropol-directed documentary might be a corrective step. While it takes the Trump case as its center of gravity, it also paints a broader (if still incomplete and imperfect) portrait of a figure far more interesting than the bad thing that happened to her. Related Stories Movies 'Ballad of a Small Player' Review: Colin Farrell's Charm Can't Save Edward Berger's Hollow Redemption Tale Movies 'The New Yorker at 100' Review: Netflix Doc Is Entertaining and Star-Studded, but the Storied Magazine Deserved More Depth Ask E. Jean The Bottom Line An engrossing, if incomplete, portrait. Venue: Telluride Film FestivalCast: E. Jean Carroll, Lisa Birnbach, Joshua Matz, Roberta Kaplan, Carol Martin, Lisa Corelli, Marilyn MinterDirector: Ivy MeeropolScreenwriters: Ivy Meeropol, Leah Goudsmit, Ferne Pearlstein 1 hour 31 minutes While Carroll had been known for her writing well before her accusation - particularly her Elle magazine advice column Ask E. Jean - she was catapulted into a new level of public scrutiny in 2019 when she added her name to the expanding list of women alleging that Trump, the man who'd once bragged about "grab[bing] 'em by the pussy," had sexually assaulted them. Specifically, she reported that he'd raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room circa 1995; Trump not only denied her account but branded her a liar, sneering that she was not his "type." Carroll sued him for abuse and defamation and eventually became the only Trump accuser who's beat him in court, ultimately being awarded a total of $88.3 million in damages (of which the documentary notes she has not seen a penny). Meeropol centers Carroll's own meticulous, stomach-turning account of the incident - much of it pulled from her deposition hearings, supplemented by audio snippets from her 2019 audiobook What Do We Need Men For? or interviews past and present. But the facts of the case are well known by now to anyone who cares to know them. So are the broader challenges faced by rape survivors who dare to speak out: the skepticism, the judgment, the stigma. What really stands out in Ask E. Jean are the just-off-center details, technically minor but devastatingly vivid. In one present(ish)-day scene, Carroll recalls to her best friend, the writer Lisa Birnbach, how she rang her up in the aftermath to try and make light of the situation. "If I tell you what happened, you will laugh," Carroll remembers thinking, "and then I will feel great, and then we'll both be happy." Birnbach responded instead with horror, encouraging Carroll to go to the police. In another, captured in the run-up to the first trial, Carroll explains, with her signature candor, one of the big challenges she faces: "Who on a jury is going to believe an 80-year-old woman is fuckable? Nobody." Whether Carroll was sufficiently attractive then or now shouldn't matter, but she and her lawyers (led by Robbie Kaplan) know very well that it does. She thus makes a point of hiring the same hair and makeup stylist she worked with in the '90s, Lisa Corelli, to make her look as much as possible like she did back then. As Ask E. Jean tracks her cases, it also assembles a non-chronological picture of who she is and was beyond Trump: the college cheerleading career, the gonzo journalism assignments, the martini-soused nights at Elaine's, the long-running advice column in Elle (which Carroll notes was terminated in 2020: "A women's magazine fires a woman for standing up to a powerful man? As we say in the fashion world, not a good look"). Briefly, the film becomes a wistful celebration of the heyday of glossy magazines; as a writer who grew up just late enough to see it give way to digital media, I'd happily have watched a whole movie about those years recounted in Carroll's funny, fearless voice. Meeropol uses onscreen captions and dates only sparingly, which can make the flow of Carroll's life a bit difficult to track. It takes more puzzling than it should to figure out where on the timeline to place a briefly mentioned stint wri