E. Jean Carroll is back in the news again. The 82-year-old writer and one-time Elle Magazine advice columnist has defeated Donald Trump in court twice after accusing him of sexual assault in a department store dressing room in the mid-’90s. She was awarded $5 million in damages in 2023 by a jury that found Trump guilty of sexual abuse. The following year, she won $83 million in a defamation case. The money is in escrow pending various appeals.
But the president is not content with letting the appeals courts tell the tale. He has sicced his Justice Department on Carroll, accusing her of perjury in a 2022 deposition for not remembering she had outside funding. In April 2023, Carroll’s lawyers told Trump’s attorneys that she now remembered she had been partly funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. That’s who the DOJ is targeting with accusations of money laundering and obstruction.
And this week, Ivy Meeropol‘s documentary on Carroll’s remarkable life and courtroom triumphs, “Ask E. Jean,” which played well at Telluride last fall, is hitting theaters in New York and Los Angeles before expanding to other cities. The film was not easy to finance, and no major distributor would go near it. But it got made because Oscar-nominated producer Laura Bickford (“Traffic”) knows her way around independent financing.
Once Carroll agreed in 2019 to participate in a documentary on her life, Meeropol thought she could go directly to HBO, where she had made “Heir to an Execution,” among other films. “I thought, ‘I have a home run here. E. Jean Carroll is willing to do a documentary with me, give me some development money.’”
The reaction was across the board, said Meeropol: “We’re tired of ‘me too’ stories. ‘Trump fatigue’ was the catch phrase. I said, ‘Dude, is there fatigue around getting any justice?’”
At this stage, Carroll hadn’t yet gone to trial. “We didn’t know where it was going,” said Meeropol.
“It was right after the end of the first Trump administration,” said Bickford. “Everyone was like, ‘ugh.’”
Meeropol realized she needed to develop the project and show people what the story was. She landed a development deal with Concordia Studios; they went out with a pitch reel and deck. “I got the meetings,” she said. “I was able to talk about it. Nobody wanted it. That’s where Laura said, ‘Okay, we’re going to find a way to make this film, we’re going to find the budget.’”
Bickford knew how to raise independent financing for her scripted movies (“Margin Call”) with equity investors and donors. Impact partners came in as well. “We started with a little bit of the equity, and as we were making it,” she said, “we were raising money.”
Initially, Carroll resisted making the movie, but was impressed by Meeropol’s 2019 HBO film “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.” Once she got accustomed to being followed around, she was fine, said Meeropol. “She is so beautiful. She has 20 different looks.”
The film goes back in time to show the evolution of Carroll from cheerleader to magazine columnist, features writer, fashion icon, and TV cable host, through her marriage to newscaster John Johnson and more.
The filmmakers struggled to find a shape for this movie, which covered a lot of ground, from massive biographical archives to trial depositions. “We did many versions,” said Bickford. “We had to keep watching cuts.”
“There were hard decisions to make,” said Meeropol. “We had a cut which was front-loaded with too much Trump. We didn’t know what we were going to get. We didn’t know she was going to go to trial. We didn’t know he was going to defame her again the very next day.”
“He goes on and says, ‘She’s whacked up,’” said Bickford.
The filmmakers found a moment in the deposition where Carroll answers the question: “If you didn’t want to be raked over the coals, if you didn’t want to be dragged through the mud, why would you accuse Donald Trump?”
“Because he called me a liar,” she said.
“We found our hook,” said Bickford.
That structure allowed the movie to go forward and back as it wound through the story. Many people do not know the profound impact that Trump’s assault had on Carroll. She never had sex again.
The filmmakers raised the money for self-distribution via Abramorama. “We know there’s an audience for this,” said Meeropol. “It’s clear why people are not picking this up.”
“It has nothing to do with an audience,” said Bickford. “All of the distributors are part of larger companies that have regulatory issues that will be coming up under this administration, like Warner’s Paramount and Amazon, who just made the ‘Melania’ doc. We know that none of these companies are going to risk showing something like this that might cause retaliation from this president, and it is really sad that our country is self-censoring. It’s not their fault that we have a retaliatory president. They have a complicated job. It’s super disappointing. But we’re going to come out, and people will be able to see this film in theaters, and then it’ll go to pay-per-view, and then we’ll sell the foreign — we can’t sell the foreign until we come out in the U.S.”
Trump still has the opportunity to take his appeal on the $5 million case to the Supreme Court. That will play out within the year. The $83 million case is still winding its way to the second court. So far, he’s lost every single appeal.
There’s reason to believe the movie might have some fans and followers. When Carroll brought out her book “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President” in June, it was an instant New York Times bestseller, debuting at number two on the Times bestseller list.
Maybe some folks would like to see an old lady beat Donald Trump.
“Ask E. Jean” is now in theaters from Abramorama.
