Will the Real E. Jean Carroll Please Stand Up?
For years, a confident E. Jean on the outside masked a wounded E. Jean on the inside. That we do this to women is untenable.
E. Jean Carroll knows a lot about women. After watching the riveting new documentary about her life — “Ask E. Jean” — I now know a lot about her. (Watch it; masterfully overseen by Ivy Meeropol, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to throw things.)
E. Jean Carroll, journalist, editor, America’s problem-solver, is famous for many things, among them: her Elle Magazine advice column which she wrote for 26 years and her famously unapologetic tell-it-like-it-is personality, which parachuted her into America’s living rooms in the mid-90s with the launch of her cable TV show.
Then, of course, there’s her other claim to fame: She’s the woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in 1996 when she was 52. More than two decades later, she took him to court over it, in 2019 and 2024, and she won — twice.
But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
From the documentary, we understand that E. Jean was born to the kind of parents — the kind of mother in particular — who made it necessary for her to both be larger than life while also getting out of the way. In home videos, we see plenty of footage of mom striding around in a fabulous swimsuit. She looks fun, but being her daughter can’t have been easy.
As for E. Jean, she was crowned Miss Indiana University in 1963, then catapulted her way to the top of a national cheerleading contest to win the title of Miss Cheerleader USA the following year. Well, of course she did.
After some typical early-stage career misfires, she begins writing for magazines, though, as she admits in the documentary, “My writing wasn’t that good.” (Some of us beg to differ, but fine, E. Jean.) Still, she sensed that there was something about her personality that belonged on the page. From the writing, she landed a TV show. The premise? Guests bring her their problems; she helps solve them.
Josie Cox
In clips from the show, which Meeropol weaves deliciously into the documentary, E. Jean clambers over the set’s living room furniture, flops onto the sofa, her matchstick legs sticking straight up, bounces back upright, then finally turns her attention to her guests and their everywoman problems: I’m 30 and not married, help! E. Jean looks them straight in the eye and dispenses her singular advice. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t mince words.
But then comes the moment when the sunshiney, up-for-anything, tough-love E. Jean meets Donald Trump in the revolving door of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City. Trump recognizes her (she is famous after all) and she recognizes him (he is famous after all).
Here, her recorded deposition takes over the job as narrator in the film: Come help me choose a gift, Trump urges, and E. Jean, ever open to adventure, says yes. They start at handbags then move on to hats, but Trump is already heading up the escalator to lingerie. There is some back and forth over a bodysuit. Trump tells her to try it on. She tells him to try it on. And then she finds herself in the store’s fitting room, a place she doesn’t want to be, but keeps telling herself is “hilarious.” E. Jean’s delivery in the deposition is appropriately direct — but you can feel the emotion layered into it as she relives every decision and every detail that led her to this awful moment. And, oh, the questions they ask. (Was she wearing a bra? Underwear?)
It’s disconcerting to watch.
After the sexual assault, E. Jean tells two friends. One told her to go to the police, the other told her to drop it, because, well, it was Donald Trump, New York City’s most famous real estate tycoon, and she’d get buried.
And E. Jean did drop it. Being dragged through the mud didn’t sound like fun, she remarks in the documentary, in what might be the understatement of the century. Also, as she laid out in New York magazine, she didn’t bring it to the police because “I am a coward.” (Not true, E. Jean, but again, fine, but we get it.)
E.B. Boyd
From there, it was mostly silence until #MeToo made all of us a little less “cowardly.” As the dominoes fell — Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby — women’s stories became, in the aggregate, more powerful, more — and I really hate to use this word — believable. There was protection in numbers; and with so many women finally speaking out, it was harder to look away. We understood that bad things could happen even to famous women — indeed that it wasn’t just possible, it was highly probable.
Emboldened by #MeToo, she filed charges against Trump in November 2019. Why did it take so long? The answer to me is as clear as the day is long, and I didn’t have to watch the documentary to get there: It’s because E. Jean feels just like the rest of us would: terrified.
What’s painful to square, however, and what the documentary captures so achingly, is how the confident E. Jean on the outside masks the wounded E. Jean on the inside. It’s clear this wasn’t any old incident in a dressing room — it was sexual abuse, and it changed her forever. I never had sex again after the incident, E. Jean explains in the documentary.
What struck me, as I watched, was the staggering disconnect between the woman who talked about sex and suddenly could no longer have it; the woman who told other women to stand up for themselves, and then was unable to stand up for herself. The documentary includes earlier footage from a talk show during which E. Jean insisted that Anita Hill and Paula Jones should have been able to stand up to Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton respectively. Gulp.
So now we have the true conundrum: As E. Jean Carroll, the advice-columnist, continued to take care of America's problems, she failed spectacularly to take care of herself.
In the end, of course, along with Anita Hill and Paula Jones, E. Jean did take care of herself. Yet even when Carroll wins her second lawsuit and is awarded a jaw-dropping $83 million in damages (money she still has not seen, by the way) — and she describes the day as the best of her life, I had to wonder, didn’t she deserve a better best day? Yes, she had become a heroine, yes, she got her due, but she also deserved so much more. She shouldn’t have had to live with two competing versions of herself. She shouldn’t have had to bear the burden of silence for as long as she did.
Still, as the credits rolled, I exhaled. Her victory was cathartic in its way. At the very least, it was over.
As the lights came up, I glanced down at my phone where a push alert from The New York Times awaited me: According to unnamed sources, Trump’s Department of Justice had opened a criminal investigation into the former advice columnist for Elle, accusing her of perjury. Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, later issued a statement saying no such investigation was opened.
Either way, the whole thing seemed to prove, once again, that for E. Jean, and maybe all women, it’s never really over.
Claire Cozens
