DOJ opens criminal probe into Carroll while shielding Trump from her judgment

A federal jury in New York found Donald Trump liable on May 9, 2023 for sexual abuse and defamation against author E. Jean Carroll, awarding $5 million in damages. Judge Lewis Kaplan presided; the jury found Trump sexually abused Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s but did not find rape by the statute's definition. Trump attended a CNN town hall the same evening and repeated defamatory statements about Carroll, setting up the second defamation verdict.

A federal jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in defamation damages against Donald Trump on January 26, 2024 — the largest individual defamation verdict against a sitting or former U.S. president. Judge Lewis Kaplan presided; the jury found Trump's social media attacks on Carroll's credibility after the May 2023 verdict constituted further defamation. Trump did not attend the trial and continued attacking Carroll publicly during proceedings. The judgment became the target of two parallel DOJ gambits after Trump's return to office in 2025.

The DOJ opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll on May 27, 2026, examining whether she committed perjury in a 2022 deposition when she said she had received no outside legal funding. The probe is run by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Illinois; it follows disclosure that Reid Hoffman paid some of Carroll's legal expenses. The investigation runs parallel to a DOJ Westfall Act motion to void Carroll's $83.3 million defamation judgment against Trump.