The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the veteran advice columnist and author who won two major civil lawsuits against President Donald Trump, CBS News reports. Carroll accused Trump of sexually abusing her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then defaming her when he denied the encounter ever happened.
The probe focuses on Carroll's 2022 deposition. She stated under oath that no outside parties were helping fund her cases. Later it came out that a nonprofit backed by billionaire Reid Hoffman – a sharp Trump critic and major Democratic donor – had covered some of her costs.
The investigation is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois, led by Trump-appointed Andrew Boutros. No charges have been brought yet, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has stepped aside from the matter.
The Core Allegation: A Deposition Discrepancy
During her October 2022 deposition, when asked directly if anyone else was paying her legal fees, Carroll said she was on a contingency arrangement with her lawyers and denied any outside funding. But in April 2023, her team disclosed that money had come from American Future Republic, a nonprofit largely funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Her lawyers called it an honest oversight – she simply forgot about the arrangement at the time. Trump’s side, however, called it suspicious and potentially damaging to her credibility.
The Carroll-Trump Verdicts
The lawsuits ended with big wins for Carroll:
- In 2023, a jury held Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carroll about $5 million.
- In 2024, a second jury slapped him with an $83.3 million defamation verdict.
Trump has vigorously appealed both outcomes, describing the entire process as a politically driven effort against him.
The Reid Hoffman Connection
Reid Hoffman has never hidden his dislike for Trump, and he’s poured tens of millions into Democratic causes over the years. He defended funding Carroll’s case as a way to make sure an ordinary person could afford to take on someone as powerful as a former president.
As the NLPC noted in March of 2025:
Through yet another nonprofit (or possibly the same one), Hoffman also paid the legal bills for Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll, who sued him for defamation over her allegations of rape against him going back to the 1990s. To set the stage for the lawsuit to be able to move forward – through yet another secretive nonprofit group backed by Hoffman – Carroll told CNN that she helped New York Democrats to pass a new law in 2022 to extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault civil lawsuits beyond 20 years, which enabled her to sue President Trump during a one-year window. And Hoffman also said last year, just days before the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., that he wished he could have made Trump a real “martyr.”
The investigation is still in its early days. Prosecutors will be digging through transcripts, financial records, emails, and anything else that might show whether Carroll intentionally misled the court.