The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll committed perjury in testimony during her lawsuits tied to sexual abuse allegations against President Donald Trump, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
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Carroll, a former magazine writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s. She was awarded $5 million in damages in 2023 by a jury that found Trump liable for sexually abusing her. The following year, Carroll won an $83 million civil judgment in a defamation case.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and said he didn’t even know Carroll. The president is seeking Supreme Court intervention in both cases. The White House referred questions about the probe to the DOJ.
Carroll’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday morning.
CNN first reported on the investigation into Carroll.
The investigation, which is in its early stages, is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, according to another source familiar with the matter. That office is run by Andrew S. Boutros, a Trump appointee who has recently been in the headlines over the implosion of his office’s prosecution of those involved in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Justice Department is looking into comments Carroll made about how her civil suit against Trump was funded. During the trials, Trump’s legal team had called into question her comments on the stand about her legal fees. Carroll had initially testified in 2022 that no one else had helped pay the fees, but it was later disclosed that some funding was provided in 2020 by a nonprofit backed by Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on the issue in 2024, finding that Carroll was not involved in the outside funding, did not know the details of it, and most likely had simply forgotten about it in the years after her attorneys had initially mentioned it to her at the time they received the funds.
Last month, a full federal appeals court rejected Trump’s push for it to rehear his appeal of the defamation case after a panel of three of the court’s judges initially rejected Trump’s appeal last year.
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“Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity,” the panel of judges from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of appeals said in the September ruling.
Carroll has alleged that Trump raped her and then “lied and shattered my reputation.” She was awarded $5 million in damages in 2023 after a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her, but not for alleged rape.
In 2024, a jury found that Trump had to pay Carroll about $83 million in damages for repeated defamation. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court decided that Trump did not need to pay the money until the Supreme Court decides whether it would hear the case.
Trump has repeatedly denied Carroll’s allegations, which he says are false and has called a “hoax.” Last year, he asked the Supreme Court to review the case after a federal appeals court upheld the judgment in 2024.
The DOJ probe is the latest move by the Trump administration to target the president’s perceived political foes, including multiple attempts by the department to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
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