The Justice Department is investigating aspects of two lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual assault, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The investigation involves donations made by a nonprofit founded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a critic of Mr. Trump’s, to pay for some of Ms. Carroll’s legal costs. But the nature of any potential charges is unclear.
Andrew S. Boutros, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, said in a statement on Thursday evening that his office “has never opened” a criminal investigation into Ms. Carroll. The statement said nothing about Mr. Hoffman, who responded to the developments on social media on Friday.
“Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll, defaming her, and now he’s going after her again,” Mr. Hoffman said, adding that Mr. Trump “is investigating me because I supported E Jean’s lawsuit.”
Ms. Carroll has declined to comment, through a representative.
Here is a look at some of the hurdles prosecutors would need to overcome to secure convictions should the Justice Department’s inquiry ripen into the latest set of charges in its retaliatory campaign against Mr. Trump’s enemies.
What statements by Carroll could be at issue?
In April 2023, lawyers for Mr. Trump, who was out of office at the time, wrote to the judge before the first of two trials in Ms. Carroll’s civil suits, accusing her of concealing financial support Mr. Hoffman had provided to her case.
In the letter, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said Ms. Carroll was asked in an October 2022 deposition, “Is anyone else paying your legal fees?” She replied no. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that they had just learned of Mr. Hoffman’s role from Ms. Carroll’s lawyers and that the disclosure raised “significant questions” about her credibility.
“Plaintiff apparently perjured herself during her deposition,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers told the judge.
Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, responded in a letter to the judge that her client had only just remembered that, at some point, her lawyers obtained “additional funding from a nonprofit organization to cover certain expenses and fees.” That was Mr. Hoffman’s organization.
Ms. Kaplan, who said she promptly disclosed the information to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, called the funding “irrelevant to Carroll’s claims” and said her client had never met nor had communications with anyone associated with the nonprofit.
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan federal court, precluded Mr. Trump’s lawyers from introducing evidence about the issue at the 2023 trial, in which a jury held Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages. (Judge Kaplan is not related to Ms. Kaplan.)
What do prosecutors have to prove in a perjury case?
To win a perjury case, a prosecutor must convince a jury not only that the defendant said something false under oath about a significant point but also that the falsehood was more than an innocent error produced by poor memory. To be perjury, the false statement has to be a knowing lie.
Perjury has four elements. First, the defendant must have been under oath. Next, she must have made a false statement. Third, she must have known it to be false. And, finally, the statement must concern a matter material to the case.
In the Carroll case, the first element is uncontested and the second seems more or less established.
Courts that have examined the issue have already sided with Ms. Carroll on the other two elements.
Did Carroll know her statement was false when she made it?
To prove perjury, prosecutors must show that the defendant made the false statement with knowledge of its falsity. It is not enough, the Supreme Court has said, that the statement was the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2024 appeared to accept that Ms. Carroll stumbled rather than lied.
“Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise,” the panel wrote in an unsigned decision. “Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
Was Carroll’s statement germane to the case?
It’s also not clear that anything important rested on Ms. Carroll’s statement. Only lies about material matters — that is, things central to the case — can be the basis for a perjury conviction.
Judge Kaplan wrote that “the question whether and when plaintiff or her counsel have obtained financial support in this action has nothing directly to do with the ultimate merits of the case.”
Is outside funding of lawsuits lawful?
Legal doctrines with roots in the Middle Ages and names like champerty and barratry forbade outsiders from paying other people’s legal expenses, on the theory that such funding stirred up vexatious litigation. Those doctrines have withered away, and litigation finance — in which hedge funds and others pay legal fees in exchange for a percentage of any settlement or judgment — is now commonplace.
“In most states, a third party is permitted to fund any type of litigation unless the funder is motivated by an improper purpose, sometimes called ‘officious intermeddling,’” said Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and expert on litigation finance and legal ethics.
“New York generally permits third-party litigation finance, subject to certain consumer protections not relevant to the Carroll matter,” he added.
The “officious intermeddler” exception would also not seem to apply in the Carroll case. “A financier becomes an officious intermeddler,” the South Carolina Supreme Court explained in 2000, “when he or she offers unwanted advice or otherwise attempts to control the litigation for the purpose of stirring up strife or continuing a frivolous lawsuit.”
Whatever the status of the arrangement between Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Carroll under state laws, it is hard to see a federal interest, much less a basis for a federal criminal charge simply because Mr. Hoffman helped defray Ms. Carroll’s legal expenses.
Could the government be investigating related matters?
Of course. As is typical in such matters, prosecutors have not disclosed the scope of their inquiry, what evidence they have gathered or who else might be in the line of fire. For instance, it is unclear whether investigators are examining the activities of Mr. Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic, which paid some of Ms. Carroll’s legal fees and expenses.
Adam Liptak is the chief legal affairs correspondent of The Times and the host of The Docket, a newsletter on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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