No wonder he knows he is not going to his stupid heaven
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E. Jean Carroll beat Trump in court twice, to the tune of $83M. ‘People do not know,’ she tells N.J. crowd.
Amy Kuperinsky
Mon, October 27, 2025
When E. Jean Carroll made allegations about Donald Trump, endless messages of hate followed.
People threatened her with rape and murder, saying they knew where she lived.
Carroll says she received hundreds to thousands of hostile responses a day to her court case against the man she said raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the ’90s.
“It was a sludge of hatred,” she told an audience at the Montclair Film Festival Saturday.
The advice columnist, journalist and author made an appearance after a screening of the documentary “Ask E. Jean” at Montclair Kimberley Academy Upper School.
“Ask E. Jean” was also the name of Carroll’s long-running advice column at Elle Magazine.
The film follows Carroll’s story and two civil trials against Trump. In 2023, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million after she sued him for battery and defamation.
Trump, who was then in his first term as president, had accused Carroll of lying, famously saying “she’s not my type.”
In 2024, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages after he continued to call her a liar in comments he made on CNN and Truth Social.
“But the main thing, oddly, that’s going on in this country is people do not know that Donald Trump was held liable for sexual (abuse),” Carroll, 81, told the Montclair crowd.
“They just don’t know it. It wasn’t in their Facebook feeds. It wasn’t on their Instagram. They do not know. My next-door neighbor did not know that I had sued and beat Donald Trump. She did not know because she is on Instagram — that’s where she gets her stories. So this film now is extremely (important), that it gets out there and people see it because they don’t know what he did. They just don’t know.”
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Ivy Meeropol, the director of the documentary, joined Carroll onstage at the Montclair Film Festival event.
“There’s many people who know the story who didn’t believe E. Jean and then come to the film — mostly men, by the way, sorry — who come and say ‘Oh my God, I totally believe her now,’“ Meeropol said. “So the story has to get out. His (Trump’s) diehard fans are probably never gonna change, but I think there’s a turning, I feel like, in this country around issues of sexual assault and sexual violence and rape.”
Carol Martin, Carroll’s longtime friend and former WCBS-TV anchor and host, was also at the screening. Martin was Carroll’s colleague on the short-lived cable network America’s Talking, a forerunner to MSNBC. She’s one of two friends in the film who corroborated Carroll’s Trump story and testified in court.
“It gets so dark,” Martin told the audience of the trials and everything in their wake, which has included Trump’s appeals of the judgments against him. “I don’t really have a way for us to forge ahead, I guess, except through the experiences of film and talking and of communicating these things.”
From doyenne of advice to fighter for women
“Ask E. Jean” was also the title of Carroll’s TV show on America’s Talking, which ran from 1994 to 1996.
Meeropol (“After the Bite”) was interested in following Carroll’s story and her lawsuit against Trump, but when she saw footage of the TV show, the threads of the documentary really came into view.
“I wanted it to be a celebration of women, just like Carol (Martin) and E. Jean, who were self-made journalists when women were not,” Meeropol said, noting that Martin broke barriers as a Black anchor on WCBS. (Meeropol is the adoptive granddaughter of Abel Meeropol, who wrote the 1939 song “Strange Fruit,” which was recorded by Billie Holiday. Her grandparents were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.)
The film, which sees E. Jean Carroll in deposition tapes and at her cabin in upstate New York, puts clips from her ’90s advice show in dialogue with her quest for justice.
Carroll fights for herself, but not just herself — for all women who have been smeared, not believed and harassed after going public about being attacked.
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“We have to know if we file a suit against a powerful man, the Department of Justice is not going to move in and take the case away,” Carroll says in the documentary. (Trump’s legal team tried to get the case dismissed by arguing that his “she’s not my type” comments about Carroll were made as part of his duties as president and therefore protected.)
On the TV show “Ask E. Jean,” Carroll dished out advice to other women with style and real swagger — she was compelling to both read and watch, a media figure with power and charisma. She also appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” during this time.
“Hey, you’re that advice lady,” Trump said to Carroll on the day of the alleged assault, per her account.
“Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon,” she replied.
Trump saw her at Bergdorf’s — Trump Tower is across the street on Fifth Avenue — when she was on her way out of the department store’s revolving door.
Trump, who was on his way in, said he was looking to buy a present for “a girl.”
Carroll said he wanted her to “advise” him on what to get.
She suggested a handbag — which he wasn’t into — or maybe a hat. After she asked how old the gift recipient was, Trump asked Carroll’s age.
When she said 52, Trump, who was nearly 50, told her “you’re so old!”
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He suggested the present be lingerie or underwear instead, and when they got to that department, he wanted her to try on a see-through bodysuit. Carroll told Trump to try it on instead. As they headed to the dressing room, she thought she might get Trump to put the bodysuit on over his clothes.
But Carroll said he lunged at her in that dressing room, pushing her against the wall and causing her to hit her head.
She said she shoved him away after he forcibly kissed her, and he pushed her back and raped her as she continued to struggle against him. Carroll said she managed to get away and ran out of the room.
She still has the black wool Donna Karan coatdress she was wearing that day.
A journalist’s journey, and history of bad men on TV
Carroll was first in the spotlight as Miss Cheerleader USA.
She won the title and a scholarship as a college student at Indiana University. The win got her a meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Later, Carroll left a life in Montana with her first husband and pursued a career in journalism in New York, becoming a trailblazing writer and contributing editor at Esquire.
The media world was her oyster.
She went camping with Fran Lebowitz for Outside Magazine, and wrote about sex, gender, women and men for Esquire. She also became a contributing editor at Playboy and did a fair bit of gonzo journalism herself before writing a 1993 biography of gonzo extraordinaire Hunter S. Thompson. In the documentary, she recalls being in the car with the writer as he partook of marijuana and cocaine while speeding on mountain roads with his headlights off.
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In 1986 and 1987, Carroll was also a writer for “Saturday Night Live.”
She launched her Elle advice column, “Ask E. Jean,” in 1993.
The magazine informed Carroll that her column would be ending shortly after she shared her Trump allegations in a 2019 excerpt from her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal“ in New York Magazine (the film contains excerpts from her audiobook).
“I thought they were calling to invite me to the Christmas party,” Carroll says in the documentary.
Elle staff said they just didn’t have the pages to run the column anymore — that it was a “business decision.”
Carroll knew what that meant. She also knew how it looked for the magazine to make such a choice.
She began writing for The Atlantic, where she reported the stories of other women who had allegations against Trump. She currently publishes her column on Substack.
When news outlets interviewed Carroll about her own Trump story, she was constantly asked if she would sue Trump, who denied the allegations and claimed he didn’t know her at all.
“I didn’t have a lawyer, I didn’t think of ever suing anybody,” she says in the documentary.
It was the 2017 New York Times story on Harvey Weinstein and the surge in the #MeToo movement that moved Carroll to talk in the first place.
She made a list of horrible men who’d harassed and abused her — one she called "Most Hideous Men of My Life" — and Trump was on it.
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“I never would’ve written about him … never, never, never, until these women came forward, and then I thought ‘Oh, OK, this is what happens,’“ Carroll says in the film. ”'You don’t be quiet about it. You don’t shut up.’”
She made the decision to sue Trump after witnessing his response to her allegations.
“Seeing the president, the leader of the free world, going on TV for every single day for three days straight calling me a liar, that I couldn’t take,” Carroll says in Meeropol’s film.
The documentary, which follows Carroll’s journey with her high-profile attorney, Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, also looks at the way the writer has changed her own mind on women speaking out about assault.
Carroll now regrets some of the advice she gave women on this matter decades ago.
As a member of the Silent Generation (having been born in 1943), she was expected to absorb trauma and not speak about it. In one TV clip where Carroll appeared on a panel with Geraldo Rivera, she criticized Anita Hill and Paula Jones for coming forward with allegations.
Carroll told the Montclair audience that for her, this is the “most painful moment in the film.”
“It’s when I say that terrible thing about Anita Hill,” she said. “Last year, Anita Hill and I had a Zoom, and she came on, and just looking at her, I burst into a flood of tears. She was so important to women in this country. And for me to be so obnoxious, so full of sh-- to say that, Ivy caught my journey. It has been a total about-face and she caught that. Ivy got it.”
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Something she also caught, Carroll noted, is the long history of her interactions with male TV hosts who behaved inappropriately, as documented in revealing archival clips.
“It was really important to me and my team that we used sections that really showed how basically predatory the men were across the board,” Meeropol said. “It’s not even subtle.”
It started when the former Miss Cheerleader USA appeared on the game show “To Tell The Truth” in the ’60s. The host apparently couldn’t restrain himself from making suggestive comments about young Carroll.
“That kind of stuff, just pervasive everywhere, non-stop, I really wanted to show that,” Meeropol said.
In 1995, TV host Bill Boggs asked Carroll about her history with the national cheerleader title. He wanted to know, did it give her “special access to the All-American team?”
“Are you f---ing kidding me??” Meeropol said. “I mean, every time I watch that clip, I get mad at Bill Boggs.”
Trump and the photo that turned the case
Carroll holds onto hope about the documentary’s potential for connection and clarity.
“If every single person in this audience had a conversation with a Trump supporter, just a coffee, have a cookie ... and just had a conversation and just gently let them know that two dozen women have accused him ... and that he has to pay me $83 million — it would just let them know the facts and enlighten them,“ she said. ”If every single person just tells one Trumper that, we have accomplished a huge thing ... So these conversations could, well, they could save the country."
For now, “Ask E. Jean," which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August, is screening at other festivals. Meeropol is seeking a distributor for the film, but says people should be able to watch it by this spring “no matter what.”
“If it doesn’t happen the traditional route, we have plans we are already working on to raise the money to put it out ourselves,” the director said.
In the documentary, Carroll, who also wrote the book “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President,” published in June, talks with Martin and another friend, writer and author Lisa Birnbach.
In the ’90s, Carroll called Birnbach about that day at Bergdorf’s and told her what happened with Trump. Birnbach was upset that she didn’t report him.
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Martin, on the other hand, advised her to tell no one. She said Trump would bury her with all of his lawyers. For Carroll at the time, it wasn’t worth the risk — she knew she wouldn’t be believed, she could’ve been fired and she didn’t have money for an attorney. She asked Birnbach to keep it a secret.
When she decided to go public about Trump more than 20 years later, she asked Birnbach to corroborate her story. Carroll knew the importance of having other sources to confirm an account, and she’d eventually ask the same of others when seeking people to corroborate their friends’ stories about Trump.
Birnbach, who knew the potential backlash involved in speaking out, asked her family. They didn’t want her to say yes. However, she eventually agreed, and joined Martin in testifying in support of Carroll.
Their testimony contributed to her two wins in court.
If the initial $5 million judgment didn’t work, how much money would it take for Trump to stop slinging mud in Carroll’s direction?
$83.3 million, apparently.
“Money gets him to stop,” Meeropol said. “So he’s stopped defaming E. Jean. He hasn’t said a word about her book. He hasn’t said a word about this film, and it’s the money.”
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Trump was not at the first trial with Carroll but he did show up for the second — the one involving a much larger sum of money.
Carroll believes Trump’s reaction to a photo turned the case decisively in her favor.
That photo, which is included in New York Magazine’s 2019 excerpt from her book, was taken in approximately 1987 at an NBC party.
Trump was pictured greeting Carroll, then an “SNL” writer, and her then-husband, WABC news anchor John Johnson, on a receiving line. Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, was at his side.
When he was shown the photo during a deposition, he misidentified Carroll as Marla Maples, his second wife.
This was the same man who very publicly said Carroll was not his type. In the same deposition, he told Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, that all of his spouses were his type.
Because of limitations on what Meeropol could and couldn’t film during the ongoing case, these revealing depositions became tremendously valuable to telling the story.
Despite the many invasive questions Carroll faced from Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba (now acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey), her deposition presents like an accidental therapy session in the film.
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In one especially powerful part of the documentary, Carroll recalls being at her mother’s side with her siblings as the matriarch died in late 2016. They were watching home movies when news of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape broke just before the presidential election.
Trump’s so-called “locker-room talk” — “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p----” — brought on flashbacks to Trump holding Carroll down and forcibly kissing her and raping her in the dressing room, she says in the deposition.
As part of her interview for the case, Carroll explains how these images infiltrate her life, and how her memory of going into the dressing room is one of the worst. It’s because she feels guilty.
Meeropol presents this scene alongside one from Carroll’s ’90s advice show where she talks with a rape survivor. Carroll turned to the camera and told everyone that victims shouldn’t add guilt to their burden by thinking it’s their fault.
She never sought therapy to deal with her trauma. It’s only recently in life that Carroll acknowledged she’s suffered, that she’s not the “invincible old lady” she thought she was.
Carroll says in the film, as she does in her book, that she hasn’t had sex since the violent encounter with Trump at Bergdorf’s. She says the harrowing experience may be why she hasn’t been in a romantic relationship in all these years.
And no, Trump hasn’t paid Carroll a cent of the $83.3 million — not yet.
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The president is still appealing both decisions.
“We’re through the appeals process,” Carroll said at the Montclair screening. “On the first trial, he lost every single appeal. He will now appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Cue a sizable murmur from the crowd.
Carroll said she feels “very confident” about the outcome.
“On the second (trial), we won that case, and we also clean sweep in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals,” she said. “He will go to the Supreme Court and we don’t know what will happen, but looking at the history, we have never lost to him. He has always, always lost.”
In the film, Carroll says she’s thinking of buying a toaster with the money.
More broadly, she plans to use the money to start a foundation for women’s rights.
She doesn’t need a toaster anymore, anyway.
Martin already bought her one.
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