E. Jean Carroll achieved the unthinkable and might end up paying a price for it. While prosecutors across the country, including the U.S. government, were scrambling to hold President Donald Trump accountable for crimes ranging from election interference to racketeering, Carroll successfully prosecuted Trump for sexually abusing her. And after a jury awarded her $5 million in damages, she won an additional defamation lawsuit against Trump for denying said abuse, and he now owes her $83 million. Three years and a successful presidential campaign later, Trump is out for revenge.
The Justice Department, according to CNN, has launched a criminal investigation into the 82-year-old journalist for not disclosing during a deposition in her sexual-abuse lawsuit the fact that Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman paid for some of her legal fees. Meanwhile, Hoffman is reportedly also subject to his own, separate DOJ investigation regarding the funding of suits against Trump (a practice that is legal). All of this is par for the course in an administration that has made it clear it’s dead set on using the DOJ to exact pain on Trump’s perceived enemies. At the same time, as with many similar cases, the department’s chances of successfully targeting Carroll are slim, but success may not be the point—rather, the goal is to intimidate others who might come forward with incriminating information about the president.
During the deposition in question, Carroll told Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney and the same woman who failed to secure the U.S. attorney for New Jersey gig, that she hadn’t received any outside funding to pay for her legal fees because she had a contingency agreement with her attorneys: They would be paid nothing to represent Carroll, but if she won her suit, they would be entitled to a share of the damages. Two weeks later, Carroll corrected the apparent misstatement and told a judge and Trump’s legal team that she had been informed by her attorneys that Hoffman’s nonprofit did fund a portion of her defense, but that it did not change their contingency agreement.
Trump’s legal team tried to use Hoffman’s involvement and Carroll’s deposition to throw out her sexual-abuse lawsuit, but an appeals court concluded: “There was no evidence to suggest that Ms. Carroll was personally involved in securing funding, interacted with the funder, received an invoice showing the arrangement before or after her counsel received the outside funding, or had discussed the arrangement with anyone between learning of it in September 2020 and being deposed in October 2022.” This is apparently what the DOJ plans to hang a prosecution against Carroll on. Needless to say, it’s thin gruel.
Taking a stab at Carroll’s second suit, which found Trump guilty of defamation, his attorneys have been pursuing an appeal on the grounds that he has “absolute immunity” for any comments he made while president that disavowed Carroll’s accusations. An appeals court put the $83 million award in that case on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court can rule, though the justices have rescheduled the case 11 times since being fully briefed on it in late January.
Wasting no time, Trump’s DOJ, spearheaded by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is trying to take matters into its own hands, this time with the full wrath of the U.S. government. And if indeed the department is investigating Carroll, Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for Alabama, notes what is abundantly clear: This is a revenge tactic “to intimidate the woman who stands to collect an enormous sum from the president once the appeals in these matters are complete.”
Shortly after CNN broke the news of the DOJ’s investigation into Carroll, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois put out a statement confirming that it “has not opened—and has never opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false.” Perhaps sensing that going after Carroll might be too audacious even for Trump, other outlets, just a day after CNN’s reporting, began surfacing new details about the DOJ opening up an investigation into American Future Republic, a nonprofit affiliated with Hoffman and the one responsible for contributing to Carroll’s legal defense. The DOJ is purportedly seeking to charge the nonprofit with money laundering and obstruction.
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Hoffman himself immediately intervened, publishing a series of statements on X in which he called out the Trump administration for retaliation. “Trump cannot be allowed to use the full weight and power of the U.S. Government to come after women who speak up, or anyone who supports them in doing so,” he said. He continued in another post: “He is investigating me because I supported E Jean’s lawsuit—where a jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her, and a court of appeals upheld the decision.”
Hoffman concluded: “Trump hopes that these fraudulent investigations will silence those who stand up to him. He is wrong. I will not bend the knee.”
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Trump has openly criticized Carroll for years, claiming that “she’s not my type” and that the sexual assault he was found liable for “never happened.” He has continually maintained that Carroll is lying about the sexual assault, at one point even stating, “I know nothing about this woman.” Despite Carroll successfully using the president’s own words to win a defamation case against him, his DOJ is reportedly pursuing a case that will be dead on arrival.
Considering how much Trump has publicly vilified Carroll, the numerous court decisions upholding verdicts that found him guilty, and the DOJ’s atrocious track record with prosecuting the president’s enemies, any prosecution of Carroll or Hoffman would be likely to result in yet another humiliating loss. Just last month the DOJ was forced to drop its indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has come to symbolize Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, after a judge found the federal prosecutors’ investigation blatantly tainted “with a vindictive motive.”
As Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for Michigan, explained to Vox, “Filing criminal charges just to shame someone without the evidence to back it up is a violation of ethical standards and abuse of the Justice Department’s power.” And so far, it does not appear that the DOJ has any new smoking-gun evidence against Carroll, or even Hoffman.
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