The United States Department of Justice (known as DOJ) has launched a criminal investigation against the writer and former columnist E. Jean Carroll, multiple sources familiar with the matter reported to outlets such as CNN and the New York Times. Authorities are investigating whether Carroll, 82, committed perjury in the civil lawsuits he filed against President Donald Trump.
The investigation is being led by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, headed by federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros, the aforementioned media details. For his part, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, has recused himself from participating in this investigation because in the past he served as Trump’s defense attorney precisely in the civil cases linked to Carroll. His position, in fact, is understood as payment for his services rendered, because he has always been one of the magnate’s legal advisors.
The case now known, which is understood as a gesture of pure revenge by the president, focuses on determining whether Carroll lied during a statement under oath (deposition) in 2022, when he stated that he had not accepted external financial support to finance his legal battles against Trump.
Almost six months after that statement, and before the trial began, Carroll’s lawyers notified the judge and Trump’s defense that a nonprofit organization funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire mogul and co-founder of LinkedIn, had covered part of the writer’s legal fees and expenses.
At the time, Trump’s lawyers argued that Carroll had deliberately hidden Hoffman’s funding to protect his credibility. On the contrary, the writer’s defense maintained that she had never met or spoken with anyone from said organization. After the situation was clarified, the judge allowed Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, to question Carroll again in a second statement.
Later, in 2024, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in New York dismissed Trump’s claim that Carroll had lied, holding that the writer plausibly argued that she had simply forgotten the limited outside funding her own lawyers had obtained.
The sea in the background
E. Jean Carroll initially recounted in her 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For? (What do we need men for?), that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her in the changing room of a New York department store in the mid-1990s. Trump strongly denied the accusation, stating that she was “totally lying” and declaring that she was “not his type” as a further defense.
Following that revelation, Carroll sued Trump civilly for sexual abuse and defamation. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation for comments he made in 2022, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages.
A year later, in 2024, another jury ruled that Trump was liable for defamation for statements issued in 2019, ordering him to pay an additional $83.3 million. The president has appealed both verdicts and recently asked to pause the proceedings while he seeks to have the US Supreme Court review the case.
So Trump, loser of the trials, is resentful. But this attack against Carroll must be understood in a larger context, because this investigation represents the most recent example of a series of criminal investigations promoted under the Trump administration against political opponents and figures critical of his administration.
The lower Justice Department has opened cases against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, as well as Democratic lawmakers in Congress, including Adam Schiff and Ilhan Omar. To date, none of these investigations have resulted in judicial convictions, but they have generated rivers of ink, eroding the image of all these professionals and senior officials, whom Trump rejects for their supposed closeness to the Democrats – the opposition – or for seeking to turn him around in court.
Both the official spokespersons for the Department of Justice and the legal representatives of E. Jean Carroll have declined, for now, to make public comments on the opening of this criminal investigation.
