In a 2022 deposition, E. Jean Carroll said something simple and definitive: she had received no outside funding to pursue her civil lawsuits against Donald Trump.
A year later, her own lawyers acknowledged that Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and longtime Democratic mega-donor, had paid some of Carroll’s legal bills. The Justice Department is now asking whether that contradiction amounts to perjury.
The probe, confirmed Wednesday by Reuters and CNN, is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. It centers on testimony Carroll gave in connection with two civil cases she won against the president: a 2023 sexual assault and defamation trial that produced a $5 million verdict, and a separate 2024 defamation case that hit Trump for $83.3 million.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been recused from the investigation. He worked as one of Trump’s personal attorneys on Carroll’s appeals before joining the administration.
The probe may not result in charges. That caveat is standard, and prosecutors routinely open investigations that go nowhere. But what they’re looking at is specific: did Carroll lie under oath about who was funding her legal campaign against a sitting and former president?
The timeline matters. Carroll filed her first lawsuit in November 2019, after New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily reopened the window for old sexual assault claims. The allegation dated to the mid-1990s: Carroll claimed Trump assaulted her in a fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. Trump denied it, said he had never met Carroll, and called the accusation a hoax.
A jury disagreed in May 2023. It found Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and defamed her in a 2019 statement calling her a liar. The award: $5 million. The jury specifically did not find that Trump raped her, despite that word appearing in Carroll’s original public claims. Eight months later, a second jury took up a separate defamation claim tied to a 2022 statement Trump made on Truth Social. That jury awarded $83.3 million.
Trump has consistently denied all of Carroll’s allegations and is still appealing both verdicts. The investigation does not affect those pending appeals.
But for conservatives who watched the Carroll cases unfold, who saw the $83.3 million verdict get cheered across cable news, and who suspected all along that the litigation had political backing the press wasn’t interested in scrutinizing, this development lands differently.
