Recently, I watched a new documentary about an enigmatic woman of notable charm and courage preparing for one of the most momentous events in her life. That woman is E. Jean Carroll, and the movie is Ask E. Jean, a feature about Carroll’s life and her decision to sue President Trump in civil court for defamation and sexual battery. In 2019, Carroll alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s; Trump promptly denied the allegation while deriding Carroll at rallies and in TV interviews as “totally lying” and “not my type.” Ask E. Jean follows Carroll as she prepares for the trial, revealing why she’ buried what had happened for so long; it captures, too, her profound discomfort while she’s badgered during depositions by Trump’s legal team, and her eventual victory. (The jury found Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in compensation; Trump’s appeal is currently awaiting review by the Supreme Court.)
But very few people have seen Ask E. Jean or even heard of it. Streaming platforms and distributors have steered absolutely clear of a movie that so plainly impugns the president, regardless of its obvious relevance and engaging portrait of Carroll, whose decision to come forward was resolutely in spite of everything she knew she’d face as a result. “We all have a lot at stake here. This lawsuit is not just for me; it almost has nothing to do with me,” she explains in one scene to the director, Ivy Meeropol. “It’s for, really, women across the country.” In court, Carroll faced lawyers for a former (now reelected) president, making the case, as she puts it, that Trump was protected by “his scope of employment as president when he called me too hideous to rape.”
The president’s lack of impulse control and trigger-happy litigiousness have often collapsed in court, but they’ve had a profound impact on the entertainment industry. Both ABC and CBS have settled lawsuits served by Trump rather than fight, seemingly deducing that the cost and capitulation are worth it if they smooth the way for mergers and keep the mercurial and media-fixated president off their backs. (“A big fat bribe” is how the late-night host Stephen Colbert characterized CBS’s $16 million settlement to Trump, shortly before his own CBS show was canceled; CBS called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.) And so you can’t see Ask E. Jean, but you have no end of options this weekend when it comes to watching a documentary about the current first lady, Melania: Twenty Days to History, whose unusual genesis (a $40 million bid from Amazon, which was reported to include a roughly $28 million personal fee for Melania Trump, and a further $35 million marketing budget) and aggressive rollout across more than 3,300 theaters reveal an awful lot about our entertainment infrastructure, none of it good.
[Read: Melania really doesn’t care]
To be fair, most people involved with Melania do seem to feel shame, if not the ones who matter. The publicity emails sent from Amazon regarding the movie have no individual names or email addresses attached, as though no one wanted their career or personal brand sullied by association. A report in Rolling Stone this week alleged that two-thirds of the production crew based in New York who worked on the film similarly asked to be uncredited. (“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one reportedly said.) Melania is directed by Brett Ratner, best known for the Rush Hour franchise and for the multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment leveled at him by half a dozen people in 2017. (Ratner has denied or disputed the allegations; Melania marks his return to public life after a nine-year absence, although a photo of Ratner with the accused sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel—now deceased—did pop up in the last month.)
At the Melania screening I attended today, what was most surprising about the movie was how little is actually in it, despite a running time just shy of two hours. Mostly, Ratner captures his subject walking from liminal place to liminal place in five-inch heels, the camera trailing her like a lap dog. She looks immediately uncomfortable being filmed, an effect that never quite goes away. In voiceover, she opines vaguely about wanting the film to capture her motivations as first lady. “Every day I live with purpose and devotion,” she explains, while we see her being fitted for her inauguration outfit, working with designers to manage the aesthetic of the presidential balls, and interviewing various white women with barrel curls to join her staff. She talks proudly about having, during Trump’s first term, restored the White House Rose Garden (unfortunately since converted by her husband into a paved patio area).
Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none. The pace is stultifying. The camera lingers on a designer’s aide who trembles at the task of trimming Melania’s inaugural blouse with scissors. We see the first lady videoconference with Brigitte Macron, her French counterpart, about her Be Best initiative. Halfway through, Ratner picks up what seems to be Melania’s father’s Super 8 camera and never puts it down, so the latter part of the film is studded with grainy handheld scenes of helicopters and Arlington National Cemetery. Trump is inaugurated—Ratner uncharitably includes scenes of a backstage Kamala Harris looking pissed off—and we follow the president and his wife to three balls. Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files.
What’s in the film—lots of shots of tech bosses paying homage to Trump, Ratner trying to get Melania to sing along to “Billie Jean,” Melania’s insistence on the sacred values of the Constitution and its protection of individual rights—is almost less compelling than what’s not. (Any glimpse of Stephen Miller.) But Melania’s heavy focus on its subject, despite her husband being one of the most attention-sucking people on the planet, does raise one interesting question: Is his wife the only person Trump can stand being upstaged by? Throughout, the president seems truly proud and enamored of Melania. “You look beautiful, beautiful,” he tells her in one scene. “Like a movie star.” (I laughed out loud at one phone call, during which Melania, in New York, seems exasperated when her husband won’t shut up about how big his election victory was.)
What might make people curious to see Melania, despite the movie’s questionable origins and terrible timing—the merch-heavy White House premiere for the movie on Saturday night coincided with mass grief and outrage in America over the killing of the ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents—is the fact that Melania Trump is our least accessible first lady in recent memory. Like all true divas, she mostly declines to reveal herself in public these days unless there’s a formal event or something to sell. Almost all of her Instagram posts over the past year have promoted her movie, her branded ornament collection, her memecoin, or her “AI audiobook.” At her husband’s second inauguration, she wore a black-and-white broad-brimmed hat that covered half of her face and kept everyone near her at arm’s length. (On a state visit to the United Kingdom, she opted for a dark-purple version so forbidding that you couldn’t see her at all, an aesthetic the website Defector labeled “Babadook mode.”) The first lady is both “fiercely private,” according to one of her former confidantes, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, and largely unbothered by scandal. “For her,” Wolkoff wrote in her 2020 book, Melania and Me, “public disgrace was nothing more than brushing sand off her feet after a quick stroll on the beach.”
Others might not be as adept at doing so. It bears underlining here that first ladies prior to Melania have typically declined—out of a sense of propriety rather than specific ethical constraints—to profit directly from their role while in office. Trump world has been notably different in this regard. The idea for a documentary was supposedly sparked by the success of Melania’s 2024 memoir of the same title, in which she ignored the dozens of women who’d accused her husband of sexual assault, Carroll among them, but spent four full pages analyzing a failed caviar-based skin-care line she’d hoped to launch. (Donald Trump has always denied any allegations of assault and harassment.) “It is my sincere wish that you will find inspiration in my journey,” the first lady wrote in the introduction, before gliding over highly selective accounts of her early days dating “Donald,” her jewelry line for QVC, her “proactive adoption of blockchain technologies” (Melania-branded non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies), and her relationships with her stepchildren, which apparently benefit from “boundaries.”
Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers. Melania Trump really doesn’t seem to care about the optics of launching her $75 million show reel while the country is in such profound crisis—that much she has always made clear. But most Americans do. And the particular details of the past week—the demonstrations and the tear gas in Minneapolis, the Melania ads covering the Sphere, the themed macarons at the White House, the scurrying-away of many who were professionally involved with this documentary—should be remembered long after the film itself is forgotten.
The post The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace appeared first on The Atlantic.
