For decades, the pioneering journalist E. Jean Carroll had been among the most influential voices of the media, making a dedicated consulting column for the magazine until 2019, after countless distinctions to his name as a television animator, writer “SNL”, successful author and woman editor -in -chief of women in Esquire, Playboy and outside. Since 2019, after having expressed his allegations of sexual assault and his defamation allegations against President Trump, Carroll has added not one but two other triumphs to his curriculum vitae: winning two distinct legal battles against the current president through a jury of the civil court who found him responsible for the sexual assault in Carroll and defamation. She first received $ 5 million in 2023, then after starting Trump, $ 83 million in 2024.
With the strongly structured documentary “Ask E. Jean”, the director Ivy Meeropol accomplishes the quasi-impossible, telling the story of Carroll in a way as exciting and shamelessly as his subject. How can we possibly adapt to multiple electrifying lives in which Carroll prospered in 90 minutes compact? Throughout his film, Meeropol shows the way with panache, refusing to limit the main call of Carroll to his recent victories against Trump. In this, “Ask E. John” is not at all interested in painting a false feeling of victimization – he rather succeeds as a celebration of a singularly authentic person, the one who beat Trump not only against the chances and despite his powers, but also thanks to whom she has always been as a trust in the spaces dominated by the men of her career.
Meeropol’s approach seems immediately appropriate while Carroll states his intentions by continuing Trump at the start of the film. After all, Carroll had built all his reputation around his brutally honest voice; She was not going to defend anyone attacking this foundation. Patiently and engaging, Meeropol takes the spectator through the first days of Carroll’s career, building the main details of his life with archive photos and images (with particularly colorful clips of his television program from the mid-90s), as well as original camera interviews with Carroll itself.
Thanks to the perceptual work of Leah Goudsmit and Ferne Pearlstein, a clear image of the subject emerges quickly. To start, Carroll was still aimed at raising women, encouraging them to take care of in patriarchal spaces. And with her style of intrepidity without frills, she was always intended for great things in the media – less concerned by her starter apartment in New York who had neither a kitchen nor a bathtub, but more focused on opportunities that finally led her to very publicized interviews with places of French Lebowitz, and brought her face to face with icons Elaine.
And so the reader of advice formerly-ups of the columns of advice rose regularly on his way, winning a job at the magazine Elle on the heels of the unique Gonzo style journalism work that she did to sketch. Here, Meeropol with love with love with a healthy slice of the film to a feeling of nostalgia for the media, remembering an era when names like Joan Didion wrote in consumer publications, and a proud editorial process was the precious norm. In a scene, Carroll asks with playful Meeropol: “Does your audience know today what a magazine is?” It is a constant and respectful wink in days of pre-sustack journalism. At the time, she could hold America’s pulse in her hands through the types of questions that her readers often asked her.
However, “ask E. Jean” is not really a film on the good days, knowing too well that ancient times were not exactly good for certain groups of people, including women. Carroll was lucky to have models she could admire, including her adventurous and admirably formidable mother. “Being raised by someone like her, I was going to become a waddow, a hard nose,” reflects Carroll, asking me if she had become a bit of both retrospectively. Since today’s objective, she criticizes sober with regard to some of the advice she gave in the 90s: an era when women really took their own chief, wondering if she has always empowered the advice seekers in the right way. Consequently, Carroll admits that without the #MeToo movement, she would probably not have publicly shared her allegations of sexual assault against Trump. As such, Meeropol’s film follows with Carroll compassion as it reflects if it was good to take the advice she gave to others for herself. As Carroll says, “do not give the other person the power. Always press the accusations. ”
A cutting in a reflected way together the two Carroll hearings in 2022 and 2023, Meeropol brings together the details of the events of 1996, when Carroll says that Trump raped her in a locker room in Bergdorf Goodman. (Although he was tried responsible for sexual assault by the jury, and despite the fact that more than 20 women left the allegations against the president, Trump continued to assert that this assault never took place, and that Carroll is “not his guy”.) It was apparently New York when she met him in the rotating doors of the store.
One of the most disturbing things to emerge from “Ask E. John” is not only the exasperating affirmation of Trump according to which sexual assault has something to do with the looks of a woman, but also how Carroll had to sail in a similar type of masculine -looking philosophy before taking a position in front of the jury. Basically, she provided that the jury could look at her 80 -year -old face if she didn’t look like her old self. So, for the trial, she hired the same makeup artist of her youth, just to project an image. In the end, the emotional resonance of the story of Carroll is heartbreaking, especially when she says that she continued to blame herself on the assault, just as she would say to other women: “It is not your fault.” Meeropol goes deep into the Carroll psyche in these moments, examining what the consequences of the aggression meant for his romantic relationships, her marriages and his sexual desire.
“Ask E. John” is intelligent to never transform the story of Carroll into a partisan problem, a position that makes the film deserve a wide and urgent release beyond a festival race. Indeed, anyone with a legal compass and reservations of empathy is invited to share the feelings of Carroll – optimism, anger, confusion, joy and all things between the two – in the light of the facts that Meeropol passes carefully the victories and the losses of Carroll, and various hearts with his good friends and his prosecutor Roberta Kaplan. It should also be noted that Carroll has still not seen a single penny of its total victory of $ 88 million. (Her future expenditure aspirations remain as altruistic as to open a support center for women, and as modest as buying a good toaster.) And she has lost her longtime post in the middle of the legal battle. (The magazine says he has just made a commercial decision unrelated to Carroll’s prosecution against Trump.) But for Carroll, it is always his name and his reputation that counted the most, anyway. Watching her claim with challenge is what makes “Ask E. Jean” a most enriching experience.
