When Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS/Paramount over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, a lawsuit that most legal experts felt had no chance of winning, Shari Redstone, then chairperson of Paramount, caved and forked over $16 million. When Trump started making noise about DEI programs, Brian Cornell, the CEO of Target, capitulated and killed all the DEI initiatives Target had launched after the death of George Floyd. Target’s sales and stock price have since tanked, they just announced layoffs and Cornell resigned. Jeff Bezos, despite having all the money in the world, didn’t have to be sued. He just dropped to his knees and started forking over money.

You know who didn’t capitulate? E. Jean Carroll. Carroll sued Trump for sexual abuse and defamation and won a $5 million judgement. When Trump, true to character, responded with vile, defamatory venom, she sued him again and this time got $83 million. At this point Trump hasn’t paid a cent. He has appealed over and over and lost every time. He will likely go to the Supreme Court.

A new documentary, Ask E. Jean, has recently been released. It appeared last week at the Montclair Film Festival. “Ask E. Jean” is the name of the advice column Carroll wrote for Elle Magazine. It also was a TV show she hosted.

The movie has some detail about Carroll’s career as a writer, including Esquire, Playboy and a biography of Hunter Thompson, the ‘gonzo’ journalist she has been compared to. There are also some fun biographical facts like her appearance on the TV game show “To Tell the Truth” and the fact that she was named Miss Cheerleader USA while at Indiana University. 

At one point the camera catches a scene in which Trump is shown a picture of Carroll, himself and a couple others. Someone points to the picture of Carroll and asks Trump who it is. He says “That’s Marla.” (Marla Maples was his second wife.)

A substantial part of the movie is about Trump. She describes in detail how he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room. She also talks about how hard it was to go public with this, the foul taunts and threats that were directed at her and what it was like facing him in court. She said she never had sex again after this experience. She was 52 at the time.

Asked why she brought this to court 25 years after it happened. She said “Because he lied. I wasn’t going to let that go.”

At 81, Carroll is a lively, smart, funny woman. This came across both in the movie and in the auditorium where it was shown. The movie started without sound and it had to be stopped. While the audio crew worked on the problem, Carroll popped up out of the audience, grabbed a mike and engaged the audience in lively banter along with the director Ivy Meeropol.

Meeropol is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One of her previous films is ‘Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.” It is Cohn who prosecuted her grandparents and he was a mentor to Trump.

The message of this movie is women need to stand up and fight for themselves. “Always press charges” is Carroll’s advice. Obviously she followed her own advice. If the film had a subtitle it might be something on the order of “a lot of men suck.”