“These are stories that people want to bury. And the film is the antidote to that.”
Director and producer Ivy Meeropol on her documentary “Ask E. Jean.”
“Ask E. Jean” A film by Ivy Meeropol. Screening in select theaters. AskEJeanFilm.com
Thirty years after Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room, seven years after she spoke publicly about the attack for the first time, and three years after Trump was found liable for defamation and sexual abuse, E. Jean Carroll has finally received the $5 million she was awarded by a jury (plus $625,005.48 in interest accrued while Trump groped around for a way to avoid paying).
What will she do with it? “I’m thinking of buying a toaster,” she says in “Ask E. Jean,” a new documentary from director and producer Ivy Meeropol. And, she adds, founding a women’s rights foundation. (Perhaps the additional $83 million Trump was ordered to pay for further defamation will soon be added to the budget, too).
“Ask E. Jean” focuses on Carroll’s decision to come forward at age 75 about Trump’s assault, and the career she’s cultivated throughout her years as an advice columnist, gonzo journalist, and TV personality. In a time of so-called “MeToo backlash,” media industry degradation, and increasing crackdowns on dissenting voices in journalism and entertainment, Meeropol’s film is designed to be an “antidote.”
I spoke with Meeropol about framing Carroll’s story, and the larger context surrounding it. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
This film is about Carroll’s assault and defamation cases against Trump, but its scope is broader than that.
The film is about so much more than just what happened with Donald Trump, and that was a hard thing to balance because of course that’s the sensational piece of it.
We can show E. Jean as this very strong, independent woman in the ’90s, so you think, ‘She’s not someone who’s gonna let a man get away with stuff, or accommodate men.’ But it’s so deeply ingrained, and so part of how she grew up, that she could be advising other women, ‘Always go to the police, don’t blame yourself,’ and then turn around when it happened to her, and do the same thing to herself. I wanted to show how insidious the misogyny was from the beginning of her life.
All these little moments throughout the film have a cumulative effect of, ‘Wow, what are we up against every step of the way from the minute we’re born?’ And to me, I think it brings women together to recognize that feeling.
I think that togetherness is evident when Lisa Birnbach describes Trump as “a man with a bad combover who hurt my friend.” Was capturing moments like that why you built so much of the film around Carroll in conversation with her friends?
That was exactly what I wanted. The theme of women talking to each other, because we all have these stories that we share, and then we think, ‘Well, that’s what women go through.’
As I got deeper into it, the theme of female friendship became really strong. Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin are so crucial to the case because they’re her outcry witnesses, meaning who she first told, and then they were willing to come forward, rather than staying anonymous, for her. There’s so much power in that, and I see audiences come out of the film, especially groups of younger women, feeling really excited by that theme.
You can’t tell Carroll’s story without also telling a story about the journalism industry, both how she shaped it and how it shaped her narrative once she spoke publicly about the assault. How did you try to reckon with the media’s role through this project?
She wasn’t trained in any way. When she first came out about the assault, and before she hooked up with her attorney Robbie Kaplan and filed her lawsuit, when the story first broke, she went on all the shows and she was very much herself. And they could take everything out of context, make her look like a kook, which was what Trump was already calling her, and really exacerbate a situation in which she’s just trying to grapple with something real and tell the truth, and she’s misrepresented.
I felt protective of her. I wanted to make sure that the film put people in context. We have time to do that, and we have so much power as newsmakers, writers, journalists, filmmakers, to manipulate a story, and this is a huge responsibility. I wanted to make sure people could see what I see, which is someone who’s incredible and brave. She’s expressive, she’s eccentric, she’s all of these things—but she can be all of those things, and still be telling a very relatable story, even if it seems unbelievable.
One of the moments that affected me most is the footage of when Carroll appeared on TV after Anita Hill accused at-the-time Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. In the clip, she questions why Hill didn’t simply say ‘shut up, Clarence.’ It’s painful and uncomfortable to watch, and it also captures a pervasive way of thinking that even those who’ve experienced assault get trapped in.
Later, we see footage of Carroll being deposed and being badgered with similar questions. And we see her saying, ‘I wasn’t smart so I felt guilty that I was being a bad example to women. I still feel guilty.’
Of course E. Jean hates that clip from the interview about Anita Hill, but she totally understands the importance of it.
And my editors were so brilliant in highlighting the badgering in the deposition footage, because we really wanted to show how Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, will not let up. She’s asking for specific examples of times E. Jean’s life has been affected because of the assault. And E. Jean is saying, ‘It’s an underlying theme of my life.’
It just kind of lives with her, not always at the forefront, and then it can come out. Her mother was dying, and the presidential campaign was underway, and that was when the ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ tape came out. She was in this horrible moment, and there was Donald Trump’s voice everywhere, bragging that he can do exactly what he had done to E. Jean.
At one point, Carroll says that ‘to dwell on something that is horrendous makes the period [when] you’re dwelling on it also horrendous.’
And we see how being made to dwell on this experience, as a result of coming forward, is impacting her life all these years later. We see her having a sort of ‘makeover’ ahead of having to testify and make other appearances related to the lawsuits. It’s bleak, and it’s also pragmatic, because as she says, ‘Who on a jury is gonna believe that an 80-year-old woman is fuckable?’ And that’s what she’s up against.
It’s complicated, and I hope it comes through. Some people are really taken aback when she first says that, but I think it’s really important, and the fact that she even said it that way makes it stronger. It was a very major part of having to prepare for that trial.
But E. Jean’s someone who has always talked about using her looks. She’s had to be very feminine, and also one of the boys. She’s had to be this serious person who has to appear not care about how she looks, because she’s not supposed to be attracting men, because that’s what women who are bringing forward claims of sexual assault or rape always have to contend with.
And I think that’s part of what was appealing about E. Jean for me, too, is that she wasn’t gonna play that game, she wasn’t gonna pretend that she wasn’t flirting with Donald Trump. She was flirting with him, and she was having a good time, and women are so often forced to pretend they are somehow not participating in any way, and it’s just not realistic.
To participate in any way is to suggest that anything can happen to you and you deserve it. It’s like, you flirted, so you can be raped. You consented in advance.
Yes. Yes.
And then there’s the whole idea that after you’ve been raped or assaulted, you’re never supposed to have a good time in your life again, because if you do then somehow it’s no longer true that you were hurt. That’s something E. Jean had to cope with even during the trials. Someone would report, ‘Oh, E. Jean’s at a party,’ and it’s like, ‘She’s not allowed to be having a good time.’
Meanwhile she’s buried it so deeply, for so long. And I think it’s really important to show that, and also to show how she herself didn’t fully understand how it affected her until she looked at it. She talked to a psychiatrist as part of the depositions, who was also deposed about her state of mind, and who came to the conclusion that E. Jean is a traumatized person who has buried this with bravado and overcompensation. People can live like that for their whole lives, and they do.
In the years since the MeToo movement peaked, as we’ve seen known predators thrive, it honestly sometimes feels like people care less about sexual violence and violence against women than ever. How did that cultural landscape inform the making of this film?
I felt let down by the fact that the #MeToo movement just kind of collapsed. I don’t mean that as shade toward the movement itself. It’s society. We’ve lost Roe v. Wade. Our president is someone who’s been found liable for sexual abuse, and has numerous other accusers, and is in the Epstein files. So in making the film, I felt like we were on a mission in some ways. It’s E. Jean’s story, but how can we also have a story that really reminds everyone?
That’s why it was so important to us to put the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape in there. Because that was 2016. If you’re coming of age later, and you only really know president Trump in his second term, a lot of young women don’t even know that he said that. And that’s a confession of what he does, what he did, and what he did to E. Jean.
This film has been a long time coming. We’ve been working on it for six years, and somehow I feel like we’ve landed at the perfect time to release it. I feel like people are ready to hear this story, and with everything that’s going on, so many other brave women coming forward—Epstein survivors, Gisele Pelicot—I just keep thinking it feels like there’s this momentum. I want to be part of inspiring women to tell their stories and see how much stronger they feel when they do. Not that everybody has to take it to court, and E. Jean would never say that either, but it’s about reckoning with it with yourself or however you want to express it, and finding communion with other women.
I think it’s a collective experience to watch this together. People think it must be a grim story, and it is, but it’s also a lot of fun. Because it’s E. Jean, those two things can coexist.