The Criminal Probe of E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

On May 27, three experienced CNN journalists reported that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the now 82-year-old woman who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1996.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had recused himself from the inquiry, CNN reported, because of his prior representation of Trump in the Carroll matter, but the inquiry was “being overseen by other officials in the deputy attorney’s general’s office.” They, in turn, had referred the matter to Andrew Boutros, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, according to CNN.

Other papers soon independently confirmed the gist of CNN’s story. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, declined comment to all those media outlets. Kaplan also declined a request for comment for this article.

But Boutros apparently began to receive blowback about the vindictive appearance of opening a criminal probe into the alleged—indeed, adjudicated—victim of the president’s sexual assault. Coincidentally, Boutros was already on the defensive for having presided over the prosecution of the “Broadview Six”—a high-profile case targeting ICE protesters in Chicago—which had imploded a week earlier amid cascading evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.  

So on May 28, Boutros issued a denial, of sorts: “In light of the widespread-reporting and intense media and public interest into the E. Jean Carroll matter in New York, the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office can confirm that it has not opened—and has never opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false.”

But the “category” of “claim” that Boutros denied was conspicuously narrow. His office had not opened an inquiry, he said; he did not address whether the main office at the Justice Department had.

CNN, meanwhile, updated its story to specify that its sources reaffirmed its original account. The New York Times specified that “people briefed on the investigation” had told the paper on May 27 that Carroll “was a primary target.”

In any event, by then papers were also reporting that Reid Hoffman, who provided some financial support to Carroll’s attorney through his Chicago-based nonprofit, American Future Republic, was a subject of the inquiry—whether in addition to Carroll or alone. Hoffman is the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, and an important fundraiser for Democrats and their causes.

In a social media thread on X, Hoffman said the accusations against him were “absurdly false. He is investigating me because I supported E. Jean’s lawsuit — where a jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her, and a court of appeal upheld the decision. ... Trump hopes that these fraudulent investigations will silence those who stand up to him. He is wrong. I will not bend the knee.”

Given the confusion, some reporters have begun to write that the subject of this inquiry is “E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits”— though, of course, lawsuits don’t commit crimes.

But regardless of the formulation, it’s clear that Hoffman and Carroll are the ones in the crosshairs. It’s also clear that this inquiry is an archetypal illustration of what then-Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson called, in 1940, “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”

At this stage, trying to rank the dubiousness—or cruelty—of the Trump administration’s seemingly vindictive criminal probes or prosecutions has become a fools’ errand. Would it be the probe of Jerome Powell, the then chair of the Federal Reserve, that’s baselessness led U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to quash two grand jury subpoenas, finding “essentially zero basis to suspect [him] of a crime”? Would it be the contemplated charges against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and five other Democratic members of Congress, that a grand jury rejected? Would it be the risible seashell charges now pending against former FBI Director James Comey. Would it be the earlier, stale, and tortured false statement accusations against Comey that were dismissed due to the illegal appointment of a White House aide to prosecute him, after a different federal prosecutor balked at doing so? 

Would it be the nitpicking mortgage charges against former Attorney General Letitia James, that at least two grand juries have rebuffed, or similar allegations that a federal judge in Albany refused to permit a different illegally appointed U.S. attorney to pursue against her? And the list goes on: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case has been dismissed as vindictive; Ksenia Petrova, who has been granted discovery into the vindictiveness of the prosecution against her; Adam Schiff, for whom Trump has explicitly ordered up charges but for whom none have yet been conjured: or John Brennan, the target of a sprawling “grand conspiracy” inquiry based in the Fort Pierce division of the Southern District of Florida—a venue having little apparent connection to Brennan, but one in which Trump has enjoyed startling litigation successes in the past.

Still, whether the target of the “Carroll lawsuits inquiry” is Carroll or Hoffman, and despite the stiff competition, it unquestionably ranks among the most dubious to have surfaced to date.

What is the hypothesized crime? All of the reporting suggests that the inquiry stems from an inaccurate answer Carroll gave during a deposition in October 2022, when she denied receiving third-party litigation funding. In fact, as will be discussed in detail below, two years before that deposition Carroll’s attorney, Kaplan, had obtained some financial assistance from Hoffman’s nonprofit, America Future Republic.

But Kaplan notified Trump’s attorneys of her client’s misstatement in April 2023—before either of Carroll’s two trials took place. So it’s hard to see how Trump was harmed, or why one would imagine that Carroll intentionally withheld information that she later voluntarily provided.

As explained in further detail below, the district judge presiding over Carroll’s civil case concluded that her initial inaccurate answer, considered in context, did not provide any basis for questioning Carroll’s credibility. A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed.

Inaccurate testimony in civil depositions is ubiquitous. Intentionally false testimony—that can be proven to be so beyond a reasonable doubt—can theoretically be prosecuted as perjury. But prosecutions stemming from perjury in civil depositions are extremely rare.

They are not unheard of, of course. The best known instance was when President Clinton was investigated for perjury at a civil deposition in the Paul Jones case. But Clinton had also given false testimony before a grand jury—a much more serious circumstance. The House of Representatives impeached Clinton for his false grand jury testimony—but not for the false civil testimony—and the Senate acquitted. The judge in Clinton’s civil case fined him for civil contempt. Then Independent Counsel Robert Ray dropped his criminal inquiry of Clinton in exchange for Clinton’s admission that he had given misleading testimony and his consent to a five-year suspension of his bar license.

What would the charge be for Hoffman, however? It’s hard to say. According to the Washington Post, prosecutors are looking at whether Hoffman’s nonprofit “could have directed Carroll to lie during that deposition, according to the people familiar with the probe. The investigation is examining potential money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction charges, the people said.”

No known evidence to date remotely supports such accusations, but, of course, it’s impossible to know what evidence Boutros might possess.

Third-party litigation funding itself is generally lawful and common, though many defendants do not like it. There is at least one public traded company devoted to it. In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, third-party funding was considered unethical—referred to as “champerty” or “maintenance,” depending on the details of the arrangement—but many now consider it, at least in some circumstances, beneficial to society and potentially constitutionally protected activity.

Third-party litigation funding is usually inadmissible before the jury—because it’s usually irrelevant to the subject matter of the suit. Plaintiffs often try to keep the identity of litigation funders confidential, and courts disagree about whether defendants should be allowed to learn about it through discovery.

Overview of the Cases

To understand the potential accusations against Carroll or Hoffman, we must step back and see the overall arc of the litigation to date.

Carroll’s litigation stems from an event that allegedly occurred at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996. As a unanimous appellate panel later summarized the evidence presented at trial, Carroll was then an advice columnist with Elle. In her telling, she met Trump at the department store in a chance encounter. Trump recognized her. They engaged in light banter. He asked her to help him buy a gift for a girl. He selected a piece of lingerie and insisted that she try it on.

Mr. Trump took Ms. Carroll’s arm and motioned for her to go to the dressing room with him. Because Mr. Trump was being “very light” and “pleasant” and “funny,” … Ms. Carroll walked with Mr. Trump into the open dressing room, which she described as “sort of an open area,”.... But as soon as she entered, Mr. Trump “immediately shut the door” and “shoved [her] against the wall . . . so hard [that] [her] head banged” ...

Ms. Carroll pushed Mr. Trump back, but “he thrust [her] back against the wall again,” causing her to “bang[] [her] head again.” ... With his shoulder and the whole weight of his body against her, Mr. Trump held her against the wall, kissed her, pulled down her tights, and stuck his fingers into her vagina. ...

According to Carroll, Trump then inserted his penis into her vagina, but a jury later found that she did not prove that part of her account by a preponderance of the evidence.

Carroll then “managed to get a knee up and push [Trump] back off of her,” leaving the store “as quickly as [she] could.” 

Within a day, she notified two friends of what had happened, according to her and their later testimony. She did not report the incident to the police.

In June 2019, during the first Trump administration, she published a book. An excerpt, describing her account of the incident, was published in New York Magazine.

On June 21, Trump issued a public statement.

I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section. Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves, or sell a book, or carry out a political agenda …It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.

He made similar statements in the ensuing days, including, repeatedly, “she’s not my type.”

In November 2019, Carroll sued for defamation in New York State Supreme Court, in the case now known as Carroll I.

Ten months later, in September 2020, the Justice Department, acting on Trump’s behalf, removed the case to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, arguing that Trump, as a federal employee being sued for “official acts”—the alleged denunciations of Carroll—was entitled to immunity under the Westfall Act. The case was assigned to Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation to Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan).

In some cases where Westfall immunity applies, plaintiffs can still obtain compensation from the federal government—though not the individual employee—under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). But defamation claims are not permitted under the FTCA, so the department soon moved to dismiss the complaint.

Years of litigation ensued over whether the alleged defamations were “official acts.” Later, Trump also raised “presidential immunity” as a defense. Under a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, presidents have absolute civil immunity for “official acts,” though the term “official acts” is defined differently than under the Westfall Act.

In 2022, after Trump left office, New York passed an Adult Survivors Act, inspired by the MeToo movement. It provided a window of opportunity for alleged victims of past sexual abuse to revive claims that would have been barred by the statute of limitations.

In October 2022, Carroll publicly announced her intent to bring such a suit under the law. Her announcement triggered a new salvo of denunciations from Trump. 

In November 2022, she filed the new suit, Carroll II, in federal court. It was assigned to Judge Kaplan as a related case. She alleged battery and defamation. The battery related to the alleged rape and sexual abuse during the 1996 Bergdorf Goodman incident, and the defamation related to Trump’s October 2022 denunciations.

While Carroll I remained bogged down in appellate litigation over immunity issues, Carroll II went to trial in April 2023. After a nine-day trial, a jury found for Trump on the rape charge, but ruled for Carroll on sexual abuse. In context, Judge Kaplan wrote, shortly after the verdict, “[T]he proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump

deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”

The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Carroll I, the original case, finally went to trial in January 2024. Judge Kaplan did not permit relitigation of the sexual abuse charge, finding that that issue had been decided by the Carroll II jury.

Trump, who had not testified at the Carroll II trial—indeed, he never showed up—chose to testify in Carroll II. The Carroll II jury concluded that Trump had defamed Carroll, and awarded $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

On appeal, the Second Circuit unanimously affirmed the Carroll II ($5 million) judgment. Rehearing was denied in June 2025, with two of ten judges noting dissents. The Second Circuit unanimously affirmed the Carroll I verdict ($83.3 million) in September 2025. Rehearing was denied in April 2026, with three of twelve judges noting dissents.

At the Supreme Court, a petition for certiorari in Carroll II has been fully briefed. The Court has “relisted” the case—postponing decision on the petition—13 times. A petition for certiorari in Carroll I is expected to be filed within a month. On June 2, Trump’s attorneys asked the court to hold off on deciding the Carroll II petition until it receives the Carroll I petition, and to consider the two together.  

The Inaccurate Statement

Against that backdrop, where does Carroll’s inaccurate deposition statement fit in? Here’s what happened.

On Oct. 14, 2022, Carroll sat for a deposition in Carroll I, although the parties understood that the testimony could be used for both cases. At the time, Trump’s lead-lawyer was Alina Habba. (During his second term, Trump later illegally appointed Habba to be acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. Soon into her tenure, a district judge disqualified her, which an appellate court affirmed.) Habba asked these questions and Carroll gave these answers:

Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?

A: This is a contingency case.

Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date; is that correct?

A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.

Q. Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?

A: No.

About six months later, and about two weeks before the scheduled trial in Carroll II, Carroll’s attorney Kaplan wrote a letter to Habba. She stated:

During the course of preparing for her testimony at trial, Ms. Carroll has recollected additional information. While Ms. Carroll stands by that testimony about this case being a contingency case, she now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees. To be clear, these issues are irrelevant to Ms. Carroll’s claims. ...

After Trump’s lawyers reacted with outrage, Kaplan wrote a second letter to one of Habba’s co-counsel, providing more detail.

Based on our discussion, it appears that you may be operating on a misunderstanding of the facts. As Ms. Carroll testified at her deposition, she had (and continues to have) a contingency fee arrangement with her counsel. In September 2020—well after Ms. Carroll filed her state court complaint in November 2019—counsel for Ms. Carroll secured financial support from a nonprofit organization that would help offset certain costs and fees in connection with counsel’s work on Ms. Carroll’s behalf. Ms. Carroll has never met and has never been party to any communications (written or oral) with anyone associated with that nonprofit or its financial supporters.

In the same letter, Kaplan explained that the funding came from the nonprofit American Future Republic, whose primary backer was Reid Hoffman. Finally, she accused Trump of making “many misstatements at his own deposition ... concerning issues that (unlike this one) are in fact relevant to the jury determination in this case.”

Habba then wrote to Judge Kaplan, seeking to postpone trial and reopen discovery. She alleged that the new information “goes to bias and motive for bringing the lawsuit.” She cited newspaper articles describing Hoffman as a key Democratic fundraiser.

Carroll’s attorney Kaplan wrote the judge, opposing further delay of the trial. She argued that the funding could have no possible relevance to Carroll’s motive for filing the suit, because Carroll filed it more than a year before Kaplan obtained Hoffman’s assistance. Kaplan said she would not object to allowing Trump’s attorneys to cross-examine Carroll at trial about what she knew about the identity of the funder. Finally, she noted that she had once proposed “reciprocal” discovery of litigation funding to Trump’s attorneys—meaning she would disclose her sources of outside funding if Trump would disclose the outside “entity or entities” paying for his fees, but Trump’s attorneys had not responded.

Judge Kaplan declined to postpone trial, but allowed Habba some additional discovery, including a short supplemental deposition of Carroll.

On the first day of trial, April 25, Judge Kaplan ruled from the bench, orally deciding that he would not permit Habba to explore the question in front of the jury.

In general, litigation funding is not relevant.

Here I allowed very limited discovery against what seemed to me a remote but plausible argument that maybe something to do with litigation funding arguably was relevant to the credibility of one or two answers by this witness in her deposition. I gave the defense an additional deposition of the plaintiff, and I gave the defense limited document discovery.

On the basis of all that, I have concluded that there is virtually nothing there as to credibility. And even if there were, the unfair prejudicial effect of going into the subject would very substantially outweigh any probative value whatsoever.

As noted, in April 2023 the jury found for Carroll on the sexual abuse and defamation claims, awarding $5 million. Trump’s appeal focused mainly on evidentiary questions surrounding Judge Kaplan’s allowance, under Federal Rule of Evidence 413 (relating to the admissibility of “similar crimes in sexual-assault cases”), of testimony from two witnesses concerning Trump’s alleged prior sexual abuse of them, as well as his allowing the jury to hear the so-called Access Hollywood tape, on which Trump stated:

You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

But Trump’s attorneys—at this point, headed by Blanche—had also raised the issue of Judge Kaplan’s preclusion of the defense from exploring Carroll’s inaccurate deposition answer before the jury. The unanimous panel affirmed Judge Kaplan’s handling of the situation.

It agreed with him, to begin with, that the litigation funding had “minimal, if any probative value on the issue of Carroll’s bias and motive.” As for motive, the panel wrote, “Carroll publicly accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault over a year before the outside litigation funding was secured.”

As for bias, the panel continued, “whether the outside funder was politically opposed to Mr. Trump was of little probative value because Ms. Carroll herself frankly admitted her political opposition to Mr. Trump, and her key witnesses testified to their opposition as well.”

Finally, the panel also found that the disputed statement about litigation funding—a matter that was itself normally inadmissible— was “not sufficiently probative of [Carroll’s] credibility” as warrant admitting it.

The Second Circuit wrote:

There was no evidence to suggest that Ms. 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 between learning of it in September 2020 and being deposed in October 2022.

***

Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs. Ms. Carroll testified that, after her counsel informed her in September 2020 that they had received some outside funding, she did not speak with her counsel about this topic again until the spring of 2023 and did not even know the funder's political position or why they were partially funding her lawsuit. Therefore, by the time of her deposition in October 2022, Ms. Carroll had not spoken with her counsel about the matter of outside funding for over two years. It was not an abuse of the district court's discretion to conclude that the available litigation-funding evidence would have little probative value compared to its potential for unfair prejudice.

The full Second Circuit then denied rehearing en banc, with two noted dissents. The latter—judges Steven Menashi and Michael Park, who were both appointed by Trump—wrote a 37-page dissent, but only one sentence of it referenced, in passing, the dispute over Carroll’s misstatement about litigation funding. The bulk of it related to Judge Kaplan’s interpretation of Rule 413, in permitting testimony from the two witnesses who alleged prior sexual assaults by Trump.

Conclusion

Obviously, we do not know if some unknown source has suddenly come forward and dropped new and credible information into the lap of someone at the Department of Justice that radically changes the landscape of the case described above. That is possible—though unlikely.

Absent such an anomaly, there is nothing in the record that warrants a prosecutor of integrity from initiating an inquiry into either Hoffman or Carroll.

On the other hand, such an inquiry could well result from a vindictive president pressuring compliant and frightened subordinates to harass his enemies. During Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has already compiled a long, shocking, and unprecedented record of seemingly vindictive prosecutions.

And if that is what is happening, this inquiry can only be described as a grotesque abuse of a compromised and debased Justice Department.