The Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll, the former New York magazine writer who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault.
The probe is believed to focus on whether Carroll, 82, committed perjury in her civil lawsuits against Trump, in which she claimed he sexually abused and defamed her, The New York Times reports, citing a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
Prosecutors are specifically looking at a 2022 deposition she made in which she claimed that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit – though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her legal fees and expenses, according to CNN.
Andrew S Boutros, the Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, opened the inquiry, as Hoffman has a nonprofit based in Chicago, sources claimed.
Meanwhile, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is said to have recused himself from the investigation because he represented Trump in the Carroll case, for which she won a $5 million civil judgment against the president in May 2023.
A federal jury in New York found Trump liable at the time of sexually assaulting Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. The jury also found Trump defamed her by saying on social media that her case was a hoax and a lie.
Trump has since asked the Supreme Court to overturn it, and has pledged to do the same with the $83 million defamation case Carroll won against him.
The Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll, the former New York magazine writer who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault (pictured last year)
President Trump was found liable in May 2023 of sexually assaulting Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s
In her videotaped 2022 deposition, Carroll told then-Trump attorney Alina Habba that nobody else was paying her legal fees.
But just two weeks before the trial was set to begin, Carroll’s attorneys informed the judge and Trump’s lawyers they secured funding from Hoffman’s nonprofit, even though they insisted the writer never met nor had any conversations with anyone at the organization.
Upon hearing the admission, Habba argued in court that Carroll’s legal team ‘conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months’ about who was funding her lawsuit.
Judge Lewis Kaplan then allowed Trump’s lawyers to once again question Carroll in a deposition, which has not been made public.
When the trial then began two weeks later, Kaplan said he saw no issue with Carroll’s credibility and blocked Trump’s lawyers from asking about Hoffman’s funding of the case.
Billionaire Reid Hoffman (pictured last year) had paid some of Carroll’s legal fees and expenses
Carroll has claimed that she and Trump ran into each other at the Bergdorf Goodman department store and flirted while they shopped.
But then in the dressing room, Carroll recounted Trump slammed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself upon her.
The accusation first appeared in New York Magazine in June 2019, while Trump was running for a second term in office.
Trump denied that the encounter ever took place.
‘I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,’ Trump said in an interview days after Carroll’s accusation was first published.
But in an October 2022 deposition, when Trump was out of office, he was shown an image of Carroll and mistakenly identified her as his second wife, Marla Maples, despite his first wife, Ivana Trump, also being in the frame.
‘That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,’ the then ex-president said.
Trump is also in the photo, with Carroll submitting it as evidence that the two were acquainted, something the president denied.
Carroll has claimed Trump slammed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself upon her
Trump has repeatedly denied the interaction ever took place
In refuting her allegations, Trump has also called the columnist a ‘liar’ and ‘mentally sick,’ saying she made up the rape claim to get rich.
But in an interview with the Daily Mail, Carroll said the money was not important to her.
‘Money is not important to me. Personally, I couldn’t care less about it, so I’m going to give the money to everything Trump hates, like women’s rights.
‘My aim is to piss off Donald Trump by giving his money, his hard-earned money, to things he hates.’
Trump later also claimed he had presidential immunity in the case, an argument the courts struck down as they demanded he fork over the money.
Following the courtroom drama, Carroll published a memoir that used Trump’s quote about her in the title – Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.
