Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry of E. Jean Carroll, Who Accused Trump of Rape

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual assault, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The investigation centers on whether Ms. Carroll committed perjury in civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Ms. Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her, which the president last November asked the Supreme Court to overturn. She also won a $83.3 million civil judgment against him in another defamation case.

An inquiry into Ms. Carroll would represent the latest chapter in Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, which has been carried out by Justice Department officials. A number of figures who brought criminal and civil cases against Mr. Trump have come under the department’s scrutiny, including James B. Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and other adversaries of the president.

Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, opened the inquiry into Ms. Carroll, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. The investigation was reported earlier by CNN.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is said to have recused himself from the probe because of his prior representation of Mr. Trump, although officials from department headquarters have been involved in the inquiry.

The investigation comes at a volatile moment in a Justice Department that appears to be increasingly controlled by Mr. Trump, who has faced little pushback from department leadership as he accelerates his campaign of retribution against those who accused, challenged or defied him in the past.

Mr. Blanche has aggressively pursued investigations against people Mr. Trump has targeted. Last month, the department charged James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over a social media post of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47,” which prosecutors said was a threat against Mr. Trump. Mr. Comey has said he did not associate the phrase with violence and denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign kicked into high gear last September when he publicly demanded that the then-attorney general, Pam Bondi, move to prosecute several of his adversaries. Within several weeks, a newly selected prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia had indicted Mr. Comey and Ms. James. But both of those cases were thrown out by a judge, and, despite the newer indictment of Mr. Comey last month, the department has struggled to gain traction in a number of cases against Mr. Trump’s adversaries.

Ms. Carroll’s accusations are among the most severe leveled against the president, and he has long sought to demean and discredit her.

In one area of contention before the first trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote to the judge, accusing Ms. Carroll of concealing financial support her case received from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a strong critic of Mr. Trump’s.

The lawyers said the eventual disclosure of the funding raised “significant questions” about Ms. Carroll’s credibility. Her lawyers, in their own letter to the court, argued that Mr. Hoffman’s financial support was irrelevant to Ms. Carroll’s legal claims and that she had nothing to do with obtaining the outside funding.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hoffman did not respond Wednesday night to a request for comment.

In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. The jury also found that Mr. Trump had defamed her by saying on his social media site that her case was a hoax and a lie.

Ms. Carroll was awarded $5 million by the jury, a verdict upheld on appeal in December 2024, a month before Mr. Trump was sworn in for his second term, when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously rejected his request for a new trial. The panel said Mr. Trump had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings.”

Mr. Trump won a delay this month in another defamation case in which Ms. Carroll was awarded $83.3 million in January 2024 after another trial in Manhattan.

The verdict included $65 million in punitive damages after the jury found that Mr. Trump had acted with malice in defaming Ms. Carroll. Her lawyers argued to the jury that a large verdict was necessary to stop Mr. Trump from continuing his attacks on her, which he made at news conferences, in social media posts and during the trial itself.

Mr. Trump, who did not testify against Ms. Carroll at the first trial, took the stand briefly in the second. The $83.3 million verdict was also upheld by a Second Circuit appeals court in a unanimous three-judge ruling.

The appeals panel said Mr. Trump “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” on Ms. Carroll, and that she was subjected to public harassment as a result of his statements, including death threats and threats of physical injury.

The court ruled that Mr. Trump did not have to pay the judgment, as he intends to appeal to the Supreme Court.

It was not immediately clear why the investigation of Ms. Carroll was being conducted by Mr. Boutros, who is based in Chicago, although a nonprofit associated with Mr. Hoffman is there.

The Justice Department’s leadership also has made extensive use of a provision that allows the designation of cases to handpicked prosecutors across the country, regardless of whether possible crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.

The department assigned its investigation into John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, to the U.S. attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quiñones, because he was seen as more willing to pursue a case viewed as questionable by other offices, according to former officials.

The conduct of prosecutors under Mr. Boutros’s supervision has come under serious criticism in recent days.

Last Thursday, he announced that misdemeanor charges against people who had protested outside an immigration detention facility near Chicago last year would be dismissed.

In a hearing in downtown Chicago, Mr. Boutros said that potential misconduct by prosecutors during the grand jury process had led to the dismissal.

Defense lawyers said that prosecutors working under Mr. Boutros held conversations with individual grand jurors outside the courtroom about the case, a breach of rules.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.