Donald Trump owes E. Jean Carroll nearly $90 million after losing two defamation cases against the former Elle magazine columnist who accused him of sexual assault.
The president, who has made a crusade against the “weaponization” of the federal government against him and his allies a central part of his administration, now appears to be turning his Department of Justice against her.
On Thursday evening, after reporting from the Associated Press and other media organizations, Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, issued a statement saying that his office “has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”
A potential criminal inquiry from the Trump administration against his most well-known accuser would amount to a “disturbing” and unprecedented escalation of a politically motivated retribution campaign against his enemies, legal experts and advocates for sexual abuse survivors tell The Independent.
Trump has spent years labelling Carroll’s allegations a “hoax” and has repeatedly branded her a liar whom he has never met. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and then another determined he lied about never knowing her, repeatedly. Those juries awarded her a combined $88.3 million, verdicts that Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court with the Justice Department’s backing. The administration’s criminal case against her appears designed to derail her victories — and silence others, experts say.
“Every time the Department of Justice devotes resources to such an endeavor … it pulls resources — lawyers and agents — from real cases with real victims whose cases do not get the attention they deserve and whose access to justice is denied,” according to former federal prosecutor Mary Graw Leary, a criminal law scholar at the Catholic University of America whose work has examined sexual abuse cases.
Advocates for survivors of sexual violence argue the investigation is a striking example of why survivors often don’t come forward at all.
“She came forward. She endured the scrutiny, the smears, the death threats,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, said. “And now the government run by the man she beat in court is reportedly opening a criminal investigation into her.”
The Independent has requested comment from the Justice Department.
The alleged investigation appears to focus on a nonprofit organization connected to billionaire Reid Hoffman, whose group helped fund Carroll’s legal bills.
But that investigation could turn into a criminal perjury probe against Carroll.
In a videotaped deposition in 2022, Carroll said that she did not get any outside funding. During her testimony, Carroll told Trump’s then-personal attorney Alina Habba that no one else was paying her legal fees.
But two weeks before the trial, her attorneys wrote a letter to the court to inform the judge and Trump’s lawyers that the team received support from American Future Republic.
Neither Carroll nor her legal team ever met or spoke with anyone at the nonprofit, they told the judge, and representatives for Hoffman denied ever communicating with her.
Dmirtri Mehlhorn, one of Hoffman’s philanthropic advisers, said in a statement at the time that Hoffman and his associates have provided third-party funding to legal efforts to “protect our citizens from violent threats,” adding that recipients “generally do not know our identity.”
Carroll had “no prior knowledge that our funding would go to support her in particular,” he said.
The judge overseeing the case determined there was no issue with Carroll’s credibility and blocked Trump’s lawyers from questioning Hoffman’s funding during the trial.
Lawyers for Carroll declined to comment to The Independent and could not confirm whether any investigation is underway, but they stressed that the statements allegedly at the center of the investigation have already been litigated.
Trump’s issues previously were raised in court, and federal judges rejected them.
“There was no evidence” to suggest Carroll was “personally involved in securing the 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” after learning about it, a panel of appeals court judges wrote in 2024.
Carroll “simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” judges wrote.
“If we were to just look at the case in isolation, it is disturbing,” Graw Leary told The Independent.
For the Justice Department to investigate a “specious allegation” in a civil case “in which the United States was not a party and a jury found a defendant liable for engaging in [sexual abuse] against a woman and then defaming the victim is troubling,” she said.
The Justice Department typically does not second-guess a jury’s verdict in such a case, “nor would it devote resources regarding a civil case such as this,” she said.
But in the context of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies who mounted cases against him, the case against Carroll “is even more disturbing,” Graw Leary said.
