Ask E Jean is an unshowy portrait of the woman who stood up to Trump

E Jean Carroll, the veteran journalist, advice columnist, TV personality and scourge of Donald Trump, has a personal motto: “Always amused, never angry.” The line, taken from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, is painted in hot pink on the mantel in her eccentrically decorated cabin in upstate New York. It’s a mantra that has likely been tested to its limits over the last seven years, since Carroll launched – and won – two civil lawsuits against Trump.

Both cases stem from Carroll’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store changing room in the mid-1990s. At the time, she attempted to laugh it off. But this particular joke wore thin. And as this candid documentary reveals, the court cases unleashed what Carroll describes, typically vividly, as an “avalanche of slime”; her inbox and social media accounts were besieged by an onslaught of anonymous threats of violence, rape, death and other similarly unimaginative punishments for the perceived crime of standing up to the most powerful man in the US.

The story hit the headlines again recently when it was revealed that Trump had finally paid her $5.6m (£3.7m) after being found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation in the first of two damages settlements awarded to Carroll. The second settlement, for more than $83m, remains outstanding. But the problem with figures this substantial – as well as the loud and distracting presence of Trump himself – is that they have a tendency to dominate. So this enlightening documentary by Ivy Meeropol answers some of the questions that have been obscured: who is Carroll? Where did she get the courage to hold Trump to account? And why did it take her so long?

There’s a kinship between this film and Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which balanced the biographical background details of its subject, the photographer Nan Goldin, against an account of a court case (Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler pharmaceutical family and their role in the US opioid epidemic). In common with Poitras’s picture, the subject of Meeropol’s documentary is rather more distinctive and interesting than the style of the work.

Ask E Jean is a solid, unshowy piece of factual film-making. The director (whose previous films include Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story, about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953) blends archive items from Carroll’s long and varied career with more recent footage, including her private deposition from 2022. Some of the new material is exceptionally powerful: a recent conversation between Carroll and her best friend, Lisa Birnbach, in which they recall the immediate aftermath of the attack (Birnbach was the first person Carroll told) is revealing and sensitively handled. Other elements, such as an unfocused repeated motif of an escalator that punctuates Carroll’s account of the Bergdorf Goodman incident, are tacky and extraneous.

Fortunately, Carroll is a fascinating and mercurial subject. She was raised in Indiana, the oldest of four children and the daughter of a strong-minded Republican politician mother, whose gift to her was confidence. With a mother like that, Carroll quips to camera, you either grow up as a wimp or a hardnose: “I was both.” With her comic timing and the jiving rhythms of her delivery, Carroll speaks like a cross between the sassy heroine of a 1930s screwball comedy and a beat poet. She won Miss Cheerleader USA; the camera loved her quirky energy and her corn-fed, all-American good looks.

After a stint in gonzo first-person journalism for Esquire and Playboy, she grew her popular Elle magazine advice column into the cable TV show Ask E Jean. Her maverick, unconventional approach to chatshow hosting – Carroll spent a lot of time clambering over the set furniture and wisecracking to the camera – made the show a hit.

But listening to her advice to guests – “Always press charges. Always” – makes for a jarring dissonance with her own experiences. What Carroll describes as a grin-and-bear-it boomer generational attitude towards sexual harassment finally crumbled in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It took a while, but Carroll’s eventual success in court was, she argues, a “win for every woman in the world”.

Photograph by Impact Partners, Flora Films