Here is where we are. A jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. A second jury found him liable for defaming her. Two separate judgments, more than $88 million in damages, both upheld on appeal.
And the person now facing a criminal investigation is the 82-year-old woman who came forward.
The Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into Carroll, the former magazine columnist who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
The investigation was first reported by CNN and confirmed by CBS News and the New York Times. It is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, led by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros.
The federal government is investigating the victim.
What they claim she did
The theory is perjury. Prosecutors are reportedly examining whether Carroll lied in a 2022 deposition when she said no one else was paying her legal fees. It later emerged that billionaire Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped cover some of her legal expenses through his nonprofit.
That’s the whole case. Not the assault. Not the defamation. A question about who paid the lawyers.
And here’s the part the administration would prefer you not dwell on: a federal appeals court already looked at this exact issue and dismissed it.
When Trump’s attorneys raised the funding question on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Carroll had “plausibly represented” in her deposition that she had simply forgotten about the limited outside funding her lawyers obtained.
The court concluded she “was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.” In other words, the judiciary already considered whether this was a lie and decided it wasn’t.
Hoffman, for his part, has never hidden his involvement. In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, he explained that his team got involved only after Carroll had already filed, because they believed a woman challenging someone “so much more wealthy and powerful” deserved to have her voice heard rather than squashed.
So the DOJ is reviving a theory that a court rejected, against funding that was disclosed before trial and publicly explained, to build a criminal case against the woman two juries believed.
The conflict sitting at the center of this
The acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, has recused himself from the investigation. There’s a reason. Blanche personally represented Trump in litigation tied to the Carroll cases before taking over the department.
Think about the picture that creates. The man now running the Justice Department was Trump’s defense lawyer in this very dispute. The department he leads is now investigating his former client’s accuser. The recusal is an admission that the conflict is real — but it doesn’t make the conflict go away.
According to CNN, Blanche has presided over a growing number of inquiries into the president’s perceived enemies, part of what reporters have described as an effort to speed up Trump’s campaign of retribution against the people who crossed him.
Why this is bigger than one case
The message here is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. It is aimed at every person who has ever considered reporting a powerful man.
Come forward, win in court, have a jury believe you, have your verdict survive appeal — and the federal government may still come for you.
Not to relitigate the assault, which they can’t, but to find some procedural thread to pull, some deposition answer to recast as a crime, some way to make the act of accusing the most powerful person in the country a thing you will pay for.
This is what the weaponization of the Justice Department actually looks like in practice. Not tanks in the street. A subpoena aimed at an 82-year-old woman over who paid her lawyers, four years after the fact, by an office run by the president’s former attorney.
Survivors watch this. They watch what happens to the ones who go public against someone with power. The DOJ knows that. Making an example of E. Jean Carroll is not a side effect of this investigation. It may be the entire point.
Carroll’s legal team has declined to comment. She has already spent the better part of a decade being called a liar by the man a jury found responsible. Now she gets to do it again, this time with the full machinery of the federal government pointed at her.
She told the truth and a jury agreed. That is supposed to be the end of the story. Under this administration, it’s an invitation.
