The U.S. Justice Department has quietly opened a criminal investigation targeting E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of s3xual assault, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
At the heart of the investigation is whether Carroll lied under oath during testimony connected to her two civil suits against the president. The first case alleged Trump sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. The second accused him of defamation after he publicly dismissed her account in 2019, claiming she fabricated the story to sell books.
Investigators are zeroing in on a 2022 deposition in which Carroll stated she had received no outside financial support for her lawsuit — a claim later contradicted when it emerged that LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman had quietly covered a portion of her legal costs. Carroll’s legal team has declined to address the probe publicly, and Hoffman could not be reached for comment.
The move is widely seen as part of a broader pattern under the current Justice Department leadership, which critics say has increasingly trained its sights on prominent figures viewed as adversaries of the president. Since acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took over in April, the department has faced mounting accusations of politicization amid its aggressive pursuit of such cases. Blanche, who previously served as one of Trump’s personal defense attorneys during the Carroll appeals, has been formally recused from all matters related to this investigation and is said to have played no role in related meetings or decisions. Oversight has instead fallen to officials within the deputy attorney general’s office.
Federal prosecutors in Chicago have been tasked with handling the case. Although Carroll’s original deposition was taken in New York, the referral was directed to Illinois due to the Chicago-based nonprofit linked to Hoffman that helped finance her legal defense.
The funding revelation blindsided Trump’s legal team just days before the original trial. During the 2022 deposition, Carroll had told Trump’s then-attorney Alina Habba that no third parties were financing her case. It was only two weeks before trial that Carroll’s lawyers informed both the judge and opposing counsel of Hoffman’s involvement — though they insisted Carroll had never personally communicated with anyone from the organization. Habba accused Carroll’s team of orchestrating a cover-up that stretched nearly six months.
The judge permitted Trump’s attorneys to re-depose Carroll, though that session remains under seal. Once the trial got underway, Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled there was no basis to question Carroll’s credibility and blocked any mention of Hoffman’s funding before the jury.
Carroll and Trump remain embroiled in ongoing litigation. Juries have collectively awarded her $88.3 million in damages across both cases — a $5 million verdict in the sexual abuse suit and $83.3 million in the defamation case — both of which Trump is challenging on appeal. He has taken his appeal of the sexual abuse judgment to the Supreme Court and has vowed to do the same with the defamation ruling. The Court has now deferred acting on Trump’s appeal twelve times, most recently on Wednesday.