Ask E Jean review – Trump survivor turns out to be tougher than he thought as she fights on

Donald Trump has almost succeeded in an insidiously sneaky trick of auto-uncancelling on the #MeToo issue, implying that he is above and beyond and constitutionally exempt, despite being caught on tape boasting of sexual violence. Through a combination of bluster, bad faith, threats, abuse and the simple fact of being US president and flooding the zone on a grander international stage, and moreover with an aggressive army of online trolls at his disposal, he has got away with it. So far.

But among his accusers, the one who has so far been successful in two civil suits is the journalist and former advice columnist E Jean Carroll, showing remarkable courage and indomitable good humour. She is the subject of this engrossing documentary from film-maker Ivy Meeropol, co-produced by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who incidentally has perhaps a few hail marys of his own to offer for having at first ducked the Jeffrey Epstein story. Carroll had an uproarious career in New York media in the 80s and 90s, in which she was a wisecracking Rosalind Russell-slash-Joan Rivers figure, creating a tough broad persona; she was in fact sometimes less than sympathetic to Paula Jones and Anita Hill in the Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas cases. Carroll had a TV advice show called Ask E Jean (given to her, as she points out without comment, by the notorious exec Roger Ailes, himself an abuser brought low by #MeToo).

In 2019, inspired by the Weinstein case, Carroll accused Trump of having raped her in 1996 in a changing room of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store: they had apparently bumped into each other in the store and had a bantering conversation befitting two New York celebrities. He had invited her to help him choose “lingerie” as a present and Carroll, on a deeply misjudged comic impulse, came along. The rape happened after that.

Carroll did not therefore defend any libel action from Trump: on the contrary, she took out a civil suit against him for sexual assault and then a second for defamation after he made abusive responses, matched by his political base. In this second case, Trump himself appeared in court. The film doesn’t point it out, but this is a reasonably common strategy in such cases to get the woman to fold. But she didn’t fold. Both juries found in Carroll’s favour, one in the sum of $5m, the next for $83.3m, and the courts have now forced him to pay the first of these.

Elle magazine, which had employed Carroll as its wildly successful agony-aunt advice columnist, lost its nerve when the first lawsuit happened and cancelled her contract. Elle emerges from this film as its second biggest villain, though it’s not clear if any of its editors were approached for comment.

The sheer creepiness of Trump is what is so striking: with nauseating contempt, he proclaimed that she “wasn’t his type” – as if that airy claim has anything to do with it. (Ironically, a photograph of Trump briefly meeting Carroll in the company of this then wife Ivana in 1987 shows that the two women did have a comparable style although perhaps everyone was influenced by 1980s New York blond brassiness.)

The case has undoubtedly taken its toll on Carroll, who is now in her 80s: but she has been tougher than Trump and his lawyers thought. When Trump leaves the White House in 2028, it could be that this issue is not settled.