Justice
Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry of E. Jean Carroll Over Trump Lawsuits
Ms. Carroll,
who prevailed in a civil trial after accusing President Trump of sexual abuse,
is the latest target in a Justice Department campaign going after his perceived
enemies.
E. Jean
Carroll leaving court in Manhattan in 2024. Donald J. Trump later lost an
appeal of a $5 million verdict against him in the case.Credit...Dave Sanders
for The New York Times
By Glenn Thrush and Benjamin Weiser
May 27, 2026
The Justice
Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the
82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual
assault, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The
investigation centers on whether Ms. Carroll committed perjury in civil
lawsuits against Mr. Trump, according to the person, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Ms. Carroll won a $5 million
civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her,
which the president last November asked
the Supreme Court to overturn. She also won a $83.3 million civil
judgment against him in another defamation case.
An inquiry into Ms. Carroll would represent the latest chapter in Mr. Trump’s
retribution campaign, which has been carried out by Justice Department
officials. A number of figures who brought criminal and civil cases against Mr.
Trump have come under the department’s scrutiny, including James B. Comey, New
York Attorney General Letitia James and other adversaries of the president.
Andrew S.
Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of
Illinois, opened the inquiry into Ms. Carroll, according to the person with
knowledge of the situation. The investigation was reported earlier by CNN.
Ms.
Carroll’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Todd
Blanche, the acting attorney general, is said to have recused himself from the
probe because of his prior representation of Mr. Trump, although officials from
department headquarters have been involved in the inquiry.
The
investigation comes at a volatile moment in a Justice Department that appears
to be increasingly controlled by Mr. Trump, who has faced little pushback from
department leadership as he accelerates his campaign of retribution against
those who accused, challenged or defied him in the past.
Mr. Blanche
has aggressively pursued investigations against people Mr. Trump has targeted.
Last month, the department charged
James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over a social media post of
seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47,” which prosecutors said was a threat
against Mr. Trump. Mr. Comey has said he did not associate the phrase with
violence and denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign kicked into high
gear last September when he publicly demanded that the then-attorney
general, Pam Bondi, move to prosecute several of his adversaries. Within
several weeks, a newly selected prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia
had indicted Mr. Comey and Ms. James. But both of those cases were thrown out
by a judge, and, despite the newer indictment of Mr. Comey last month, the
department has struggled to gain traction in a number of cases against Mr.
Trump’s adversaries.
Ms.
Carroll’s accusations are among the most severe leveled against the president,
and he has long sought to demean and discredit her.
In one area
of contention before the first trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote to the
judge, accusing
Ms. Carroll of concealing financial support her case received from
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a strong critic of Mr.
Trump’s.
The lawyers
said the eventual disclosure of the funding raised “significant questions”
about Ms. Carroll’s credibility. Her lawyers, in their own letter to the court,
argued that Mr. Hoffman’s financial support was irrelevant to Ms. Carroll’s
legal claims and that she had nothing to do with obtaining the outside funding.
A
spokeswoman for Mr. Hoffman did not respond Wednesday night to a request for
comment.
In May 2023,
a federal jury in New York found Mr. Trump liable
for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room
in the mid-1990s. The jury also found that Mr. Trump had defamed her by saying
on his social media site that her case was a hoax and a lie.
Ms. Carroll
was awarded $5 million by the jury, a verdict
upheld on appeal in December 2024, a month before Mr. Trump was sworn in
for his second term, when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Second Circuit unanimously rejected his request for a new trial. The panel
said Mr. Trump had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of
the challenged rulings.”
Mr. Trump
won a delay this month in another defamation case in which Ms.
Carroll was awarded $83.3 million in January 2024 after another trial
in Manhattan.
The verdict
included $65 million in punitive damages after the jury found that Mr. Trump
had acted with malice in defaming Ms. Carroll. Her lawyers argued to the jury
that a large verdict was necessary to stop Mr. Trump from continuing his
attacks on her, which he made at news conferences, in social media posts and
during the trial itself.
Mr. Trump,
who did not testify against Ms. Carroll at the first trial, took the stand
briefly in the second. The $83.3 million verdict was also upheld
by a Second Circuit appeals court in a unanimous three-judge ruling.
The appeals
panel said Mr. Trump “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” on Ms.
Carroll, and that she was subjected to public harassment as a result of his
statements, including death threats and threats of physical injury.
The court
ruled that Mr. Trump did not have to pay the judgment, as he intends to appeal
to the Supreme Court.
It was not
immediately clear why the investigation of Ms. Carroll was being conducted by
Mr. Boutros, who is based in Chicago, although a nonprofit associated with Mr.
Hoffman is there.
The Justice
Department’s leadership also has made extensive use of a provision that allows
the designation of cases to handpicked prosecutors across the country,
regardless of whether possible crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.
The
department assigned its investigation into John Brennan, the former C.I.A.
director, to the U.S. attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quiñones, because he was
seen as more willing to pursue a case viewed as questionable by other offices,
according to former officials.
The conduct
of prosecutors under Mr. Boutros’s supervision has come under serious criticism
in recent days.
Last
Thursday, he announced that misdemeanor charges against people who had
protested outside an immigration detention facility near Chicago last year
would be dismissed.
In a hearing
in downtown Chicago, Mr. Boutros said that potential
misconduct by prosecutors during the grand jury process had led to the
dismissal.
Defense
lawyers said that prosecutors working under Mr. Boutros held conversations with
individual grand jurors outside the courtroom about the case, a breach of
rules.
The
existence of the investigation was reported earlier by CNN.
Jonah E.
Bromwich contributed reporting.
Glenn Thrush covers the
Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence,
civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Benjamin Weiser is a
Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in
Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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