E. Jean Carroll, Tantalizingly Close to Collecting $100 Million From Trump, Now Subject of Criminal Perjury Probe

The launching of a criminal probe into the sex and romance writer E. Jean Carroll for possible perjury ratchets up her legal jeopardy even as she is tantalizingly close to claiming some $100 million from President Trump. The new probe centers on a videotaped deposition statement by Ms. Carroll in 2022 that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, though it was later disclosed that the billionaire founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman — a patron of Democratic causes and candidates — paid some of her expenses. Depositions are considered sworn testimony under oath, meaning that lying in that context can be prosecuted as perjury.Ms. Carroll’s statement that she was self-funded was made to a then-attorney for Mr. Trump, Alina Habba. He would eventually appoint her to be the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a post from which she was disqualified after a federal judge ruled that her ongoing appointment was unlawful. Another one of Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys in the case, Todd Blanche, is now the acting attorney general. He has recused himself from this probe because of his earlier involvement with the litigation. Two weeks before Ms. Carroll’s first trial began her lawyers admitted that she had secured funding from a non-profit affiliated with Mr. Hoffman. The presiding judge, Lewis Kaplan, allowed Mr. Trump’s legal team to interrogate Ms. Carroll for a second time, but ultimately ruled that the correction did not wound her credibility. He also barred Mr. Trump from interrogating her about the funding at trial. Ms. Habba alleged that Ms. Carroll “conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months.”Ms. Caroll, whose advice column ran at Elle from 1993 through 2019, bested Mr. Trump in civil court in two separate trials. In the first one, in 2023, a jury awarded her $5 million after finding that Mr. Trump sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and then defamed her. The next year, a separate jury found Mr. Trump liable for a further $83 million for further defamation.While Mr. Trump was unsuccessful in asking for those verdicts to be overturned by the Second United States Appeals Circuit, the appellate tribunal did pause his obligation to pay Ms. Carroll until after the Supreme Court issues the final word on the cases. Mr. Trump has already appealed the $5 million verdict to the high court and is expected to soon do the same for the $83 million one. He will owe Ms. Carroll interest on the judgments if he fails.Not immediately clear is how a possible prosecution for perjury would affect the jury verdicts already rendered against Mr. Trump, especially given that Judge Kaplan ruled that the correction was not material to the question of liability. Judge Kaplan made a series of hostile rulings against Mr. Trump. After the first trial he declared that the “finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”Perjury cases can be notoriously difficult to prosecute, as they turn on the defendant’s intention. Statements can also be fraught with ambiguity. The Justice Department sought to prosecute the former director of the FBI, James Comey, for lying to Congress, though that case never went to trial. The decision to prosecute Mr. Comey prompted a wave of resignations in the office, the Eastern District of Virginia, tasked with securing a conviction.The Supreme Court has deferred its decision whether to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal of his $5 million verdict 12 times — most recently on Wednesday. The president’s appeal is likely to argue that his defamatory statements were covered by presidential immunity. He is also attempting to replace himself as the defendant in the case with the Department of Justice. That would be fatal for Ms. Carroll’s claims, as courts have held that the government cannot be held liable for defamation. Ms. Carroll — once crowned Miss Indiana University and Miss Cheerleader USA — wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” and was the first female contributing editor for Playboy. She is the subject of a new documentary by Ivy Meeropol, “Ask E. Jean.”

E. Jean Carroll, Tantalizingly Close to Collecting $100 Million From Trump, Now Subject of Criminal Perjury Probe

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