Detail from the poster for Ask Jean.
Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg— and the director of Heir to an Execution, a landmark documentary about insidious Roy Cohn —is back on track with a new film about E. Jean Carroll, the gonzo journalist who won two lawsuits against Donald Trump, for rape and defamation of character. The good news about Ask E. Jean is that Trump himself is rarely on the screen. Over the past decade or so, the world has seen and heard far too much from Trump.
Ask E. Jean honors a brave, ballsy, intelligent woman who belongs to the same generation as Angela Davis and Bernardine Dohrn and is a near contemporary of Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, and who has battled for women’s rights in magazine columns, hard-hitting and humorous articles and her many TV appearances. Ivy’s riveting 91-minute doc traces E. Jean Carroll’s life from an all-American girlhood—she was raised on Ann Landers and “Dear Abby”— to renown as a college cheerleader (she was a Miss Cheerleader USA) and her larger-than-life career as a widely read columnist for Elle magazine.
Carroll was awarded $ 88.3 in damages. In November 2025, Trump appealed the verdict to the US Supreme Court. Carroll has not yet received a penny from her assailant.
The producer, director and the main writer for the film, which launched on May 22, 2026, Ivy wisely stays in the background, away from the eye of the camera, and lets E. Jean speak. She uses obscenities and words like “vagina” and “penis,” describes how she went from being apolitical to a fiery feminist who was assaulted, groped and violated by Donald Trump. In the mid-1990s, in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale department store, the letch and male chauvinist pig, who boasted that he grabbed “pussy,” pushed E. Jean up a wall, put his finger inside her vagina and then inserted his penis.
She laughed, pushed him away, exited Bergdorf and then kept silent for years—“I belonged to the grin and bear it generation,” she says— until 2019 when she brought a suit against Trump, who boasted that she was “not my type,” and that her legal action against him was “a wack job.” She was a Trump victim, but she says that she felt guilty.
Near the end of Ivy’s compelling, inspiring documentary, Carroll says, “I’m just an old woman – she’s now 82— but she adds, “Never despair.” I’m sure that Ethel and Julius would praise their granddaughter and applaud her film. Roy Cohn would probably want to send her to death row for making a brave documentary that takes on the patriarchy and that honors the tribe of free, fearless women: our contemporary Amazon warriors.
