Flawed but Sympathetic E. Jean Carroll Doc

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.

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 writing for Saturday Night Live, or an abruptly revealed second marriage — not to mention the many archival TV clips from the ’90s, most of them from her short-lived talk show, also titled Ask E. Jean.

Still, the broad strokes are obvious enough that we can see how attitudes — Carroll’s own and the culture at large’s — have shifted over the decades. The Carroll of the ’90s appears on a news program to scoff that Anita Hill and Paula Jones are “wimps” for not having dealt with their aggressors “on the spot.” She advises one guest to “always press charges,” and another to let go of her guilt around being raped — advice that Carroll herself will struggle to follow. Where a much less charitable filmmaker might frame the contradiction as a gotcha, Meeropol frames it as an evolution in thinking. Carroll, in her typically clear-eyed, clear-voiced manner, does not mince words when asked why she didn’t report Trump then: “Didn’t have the guts.”

It took #MeToo to inspire Carroll to finally come forward with her story, and both she and the film frame her battle against Trump as a victory not just for her good name but for the cause of victims everywhere: “We have to realize this win has to go on.” But as uplifting as the sentiment is, it feels out of pace with the current moment. While Carroll’s tale is worth telling regardless, Ask E. Jean limits itself by clinging to a thesis that sounds like it hasn’t been updated since shooting began half a decade ago. Rather than tackle head-on the virulent backlash we find ourselves in now, it retreats into a tentative optimism that sits at odds with Carroll’s otherwise tell-it-like-it-is attitude.

If Ask E. Jean fails to land that final note of triumph, however, it succeeds in making the case for Carroll herself, with her singular voice and storied career, as a woman worth paying attention to for who she is beyond the victim or hero tropes the headlines have so frequently relegated her to. It may not be the sort of broader social change that Carroll is working toward. But it’s a minor win, all the same.