A major new development has emerged in the long-running legal battle between former President Donald Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll, with the U.S. Department of Justice launching a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury during her high-profile civil cases against Trump, multiple major U.S. media outlets have confirmed. Carroll, a one-time magazine columnist who successfully secured two civil defamation and sexual assault judgements against Trump, is now at the center of a federal probe focused on her testimony about outside funding for her legal actions against the former president.
The inquiry centers on a 2022 deposition where Carroll stated she had not received any external financial support for her lawsuits against Trump. Court documents filed by Trump’s legal team in 2023 later revealed that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of professional networking platform LinkedIn, had contributed to covering a portion of Carroll’s legal fees and case-related expenses.
This revelation was already challenged during the appeal process for Carroll’s first successful lawsuit against Trump. In a 2024 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Carroll had plausibly testified she had forgotten about the limited external funding arranged by her legal counsel, noting that the writer was not personally involved in decisions around who covered her litigation costs. The court upheld the original $5 million judgement against Trump in that first case, which stemmed from a jury finding Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation in 2023.
That first case centered on Carroll’s allegation that Trump assaulted her in the dressing room of a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. The defamation claim arose from a 2022 Truth Social post where Trump denied the allegation entirely. A second civil trial in 2024 resulted in an additional $83 million defamation judgement against Trump, over comments he made in 2019 claiming Carroll fabricated the assault claim to boost book sales. Trump has repeatedly denied all accusations from Carroll, and has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the first 2023 judgement, with a promise to challenge the second ruling as well.
According to sources cited by CBS News, the new criminal investigation is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois. CNN, which first broke news of the probe, noted that while Carroll’s deposition took place in New York, Hoffman’s non-profit organization is based in Chicago, placing the matter within the Northern District of Illinois’ jurisdiction.
In a notable procedural development, sources confirmed that Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney during the appeals of the Carroll cases, has recused himself from the new investigation to avoid a conflict of interest. The BBC has reached out to the DOJ, Carroll’s legal representation, and Hoffman’s non-profit for official comment on the probe, and as of publication no official statements have been released from any of the parties.
This new investigation comes as Trump, who returned to the presidency in 2025, has repeatedly called for the DOJ to pursue criminal prosecutions against a long list of his political and personal adversaries, a push that has sparked widespread debate over the independence of federal law enforcement in the current political climate.