DOJ Targets E. Jean Carroll in New Trump Retribution Plot
He couldn't erase the humiliations, the verdicts, so a new front has now opened.
Trump’s Justice Department is reportedly now investigating E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine columnist who beat him in court after accusing him of sexually abusing her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.
CNN reported that the criminal inquiry focuses on whether Carroll committed perjury during testimony connected to her two civil lawsuits against Trump.
One case ended with a $5 million verdict after a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. Another ended with an $83.3 million defamation verdict after Trump kept attacking her.
The New York Times described the inquiry as the latest chapter in Trump’s campaign of retribution against people who accused, challenged, or defied him.
That framing is hard to miss. Carroll did not merely criticize Trump. She dragged him into court, survived his smears, and walked away with two massive legal victories.
The Perjury Theory
Prosecutors are reportedly focused on Carroll’s 2022 deposition statement that nobody else was paying her legal fees. Her lawyers later disclosed that billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman had helped fund some costs through a nonprofit.
Carroll’s attorneys said she had not met or communicated with anyone connected to the nonprofit. Judge Lewis Kaplan allowed Trump’s lawyers to question her again, then blocked them from using Hoffman’s funding at trial, stating he saw no problem with Carroll’s credibility.
That matters. Trump’s team already tried to turn the funding issue into a courtroom weapon. The judge did not buy it then. Trump’s Justice Department appears interested in reviving it now.
The Humiliation Trump Cannot Erase
Trump has spent years insisting Carroll was “not my type.” His own deposition helped wreck that insult.
Carroll’s lawyer showed Trump a photo from the 1990s. Trump identified Carroll as Marla Maples, his second wife. The man who claimed Carroll was not his type mistook her for a woman he married. That was not just awkward. That was a self-own with a transcript.
Judge Kaplan later delivered a larger humiliation. He explained that the jury’s sexual-abuse finding amounted to rape in the ordinary, nonlegal understanding of the word, even though New York’s narrower penal-law definition produced a different verdict-box result.
The Supreme Court has not exactly rushed to rescue Trump either. Its docket shows his Carroll petition has been rescheduled twelve times. That is not vindication. That is a grievance sitting in legal limbo.
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Trump’s Lose-Lose Problem
This investigation gives Trump a familiar weapon, the machinery of government aimed at a personal enemy.
However, it also gives Carroll’s defenders a familiar argument: Trump cannot beat the facts, so he wants the federal government to punish the woman who beat him.
That is the trap. A prosecution would look like retaliation dressed up as law enforcement.
Carroll already won in court. Trump already lost before juries, judges, and appellate panels. Now his Justice Department is reportedly trying to reopen the battlefield.
The problem for Trump is that every new move drags the same ugly record back into daylight.
Check out his losses (so far):
May 2023, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million.
December 2024, the Second Circuit affirmed that $5 million judgment.
June 2025, the full Second Circuit declined to rehear Trump’s challenge to that $5 million verdict.
January 2024, a separate jury awarded Carroll $83 million in her second defamation case against Trump.
September 2025, a three-judge Second Circuit panel upheld that $83.3 million judgment.
April 29, 2026, the Second Circuit declined to rehear Trump’s challenge to the $83 million verdict en banc.
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He's really got to go, before the US ends up on the garbage heap of history. Vance and Johnson have to go with him.