Ask E. Jean

“He called me a liar and I couldn’t let it stand,” says E Jean Carroll, referring to the lawsuit she filed against Donald Trump for “rape and defamation of character”. It’s a statement that indicates two things. Firstly, that Elizabeth Jean Carroll is not to be messed with and, secondly, just how hard it remains, even if you are a forthright person, to speak up about sexual assault.

Documentarian Ivy Meeropol follows E Jean in her fight for justice over Trump’s attack more than two decades after it happened at the same time as offering a brisk and informative profile of her. It’s a smart survivor-focused choice which means that the funny, vibrant intelligence of E Jean is front and centre even when she is talking about the darkest episode in her life. It also means Meeropol’s documentary is as close to a crowdpleaser as it is possible to be for something with such a serious subject matter, which explains its selection as Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival’s opening film this year and the closing film of last year’s DOC NYC.

Although E Jean is not a household name in the UK, she is famous as an advice columnist in the States. Meeropol drops us into her life, which is somewhat akin to being dropped onto the roof of a high velocity train. Energetic to the max and with a bright and breezy fashion sense, E Jean was the first female contributing editor at Playboy magazine, going on to have a regular Elle magazine column. She also presented the TV call-in show that gives this film its title, in which she bounded on and off a sofa while exhorting women to expect more from their lives and, in particular, their men.

E Jean was precocious from the get-go, once crowned Miss Cheerleader USA, she says: “I understood I had an eccentric personality” and decided to capitalise on that. It’s a shame, in fact, that Trump has to make an appearance at all, as E Jean is fully deserving of a film about her life without him in it.

As we learn more about her as a writer, however, Meeropol threads in the story of the court case, including depositions, all the time nudging at the paradoxical silence of E Jean in the wake of the attack – although making it clear that she did tell a couple of close friends at the time. Her experience could be Exhibit A for anyone trying to articulate the reasons survivors stay silent through fear of blowing up their own lives rather than their attackers’. One of Meeropol’s strengths is the way she allows complexity to emerge, showing how E Jean previously admonished others for not taking on the bad guy, coming to learn how difficult this can be through bitter experience.

Ask E Jean also illustrates another horrifying factor often faced during court cases – the suggestion of somehow being “a bad victim”. E Jean puts it bluntly, her concern that, at 80, it will be hard for a jury to believe she is “fuckable”, as she attempts to rectify that with the help of a make-up artist and hair stylist. E Jean may have famously won – just she of $90million – but Trump still hasn’t coughed up a cent. Questions about societal attitudes then, not answers for them, lie at the heart of Meeropol’s film, suggesting Americans, in particular, ask themselves what they can do to create a more survivor-focused justice system that makes perpetrators pay.

Reviewed on: 31 Mar 2026