The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll over whether she committed perjury in depositions tied to her two civil lawsuits against President Donald Trump, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN on Wednesday.
The probe centers on a statement Carroll made in a 2022 videotaped deposition. When then-Trump attorney Alina Habba asked Carroll whether anyone else was paying her legal fees, Carroll said no. Two weeks before trial, Carroll’s attorneys disclosed to the judge and to Trump’s legal team that billionaire Reid Hoffman — co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor — had paid some of her legal fees and expenses through a nonprofit.
Carroll’s lawyers said she never met or spoke with anyone from the nonprofit and had no involvement in securing the funding.
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The US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois is handling the investigation, sources told multiple outlets. Trump-appointed US Attorney Andrew Boutros opened the inquiry; prosecutors assigned the case to Chicago because Hoffman’s nonprofit is based there.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recused himself from the probe because he represented Trump during appeals in the Carroll cases.
“We can confirm that no US Attorney’s Office has declined to investigate any case relating to the subject matter of CNN’s inquiry. We will not comment beyond that,” a DOJ spokesperson told CNN.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, wrote in a 2019 New York magazine essay that Trump had sexually assaulted her inside a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room sometime in the mid-1990s. Trump called the account a fabrication invented to sell books, said she was not his type, and flatly denied the assault. Carroll sued him for defamation that same year, but the case stalled in court.
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In 2022, she filed a second suit under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, adding a battery claim. A jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. A separate jury in January 2024 awarded her an additional $83.3 million in a defamation case tied to Trump’s 2019 statements. Both verdicts have survived appeals at the Second Circuit.
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When Carroll’s attorneys disclosed the funding arrangement two weeks before trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan permitted Trump’s lawyers to depose Carroll a second time. At trial, Kaplan found no credibility issue and blocked Trump’s attorneys from raising Hoffman’s funding before the jury.
When Trump’s team raised the issue on appeal, the Second Circuit found Carroll had “plausibly represented” in her deposition “that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained” and that the record showed “Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
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Blanche’s recusal removes the acting attorney general from a probe targeting a woman who holds judgments totaling $88.3 million that Trump continues to contest through the appeals process. On May 12, the Second Circuit granted a stay of the $83.3 million judgment pending a potential Supreme Court appeal, conditioned on Trump posting an additional $7.46 million bond.
The Carroll investigation is the latest in a series of DOJ inquiries that critics say target Trump’s personal adversaries.
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