The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into whether author E. Jean Carroll committed perjury in connection with her civil lawsuits against President Trump, sources familiar with the matter said.
The investigation is being led out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, one of the sources added.
Carroll sued Mr. Trump in two civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and defamation. In 2023, a jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation for comments he made in 2022. Carroll was awarded $5 million in damages.
A second jury in 2024 found him liable for defamation in connection with comments he had made about Carroll in 2019, awarding her $83.3 million in damages. Both judgments were upheld on appeal.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Mr. Trump on some of the litigation, is recused from the case, one source added.
The investigation was reported earlier by CNN. The theory of the case hinges on whether Carroll lied when she said in a 2022 deposition that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, a source told CBS News.
It was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, helped pay for some of her legal expenses.
CBS News has reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois for comment on the investigation, as well as to Roberta Kaplan, the attorney who represented Carroll for the two lawsuits.
Carroll accused Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York City department store dressing room during an encounter in the mid-1990s, an account which she published in a 2019 story for New York Magazine. In 2019, Carroll sued Mr. Trump for defamation, but the case stalled in court.
She then filed a second defamation lawsuit in 2022, adding a claim of rape under New York’s Adult Survivors Act.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied the sexual assault allegations.
Hoffman’s financial backing for Carroll’s lawsuit was first revealed in legal papers filed by Mr. Trump’s attorneys in April 2023, just ahead of the trial in the first defamation lawsuit, according to the New York Times.
When Mr. Trump’s attorneys brought the issue up on appeal, the appeals court found that Carroll had “plausibly represented” in her deposition “that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained.”
“Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District found.
In a May 2023 interview with the Washington Post, Hoffman explained why he chose to help fund Carroll’s legal action, saying that “we didn’t encourage the lawsuit to happen, we only got on board after she’d already filed.”
“My team looked at it, thought that her voice should be heard because she was challenging someone who was so much more wealthy and powerful, it shouldn’t be squashed,” Hoffman said.