In another move in the campaign of retaliation that the Donald Trump administration has launched against its enemies, the Department of Justice has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who first accused Trump of sexual abusing her in a department store dressing room and who later won a case ordering the president to also pay her $83 million for defamation (he had called her, among other things, “mentally ill”).
The investigation launched by the Department of Justice seeks to determine whether Carroll, who is now 82, committed perjury in the civil suits she filed against Trump, in a story first reported by CNN and followed up on by The New York Times and ABC News among others. The former magazine writer filed two suits against Trump: the first over an alleged case of sexual abuse in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in Manhattan. The second was for defamation, after Trump repeatedly said that she had fabricated the assault, that she wasn’t his type and that she had made it up to boost sales of her book.
In 2023 a federal court ruled in Carroll’s favor, ordering Trump to pay her $5 million in damages. But a year later the award rose substantially, after another court ordered Trump, who by then was a candidate in the presidential election, to pay jer $83.3 million in damages because he had destroyed her reputation as a journalist by denying what she had reported. Trump reacted angrily. “Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party,” he wrote on his Truth Social network. Now, with the full machinery of government in his hands, he has struck back. The president already asked the Supreme Court last November to stay the judgment.
Media reports say the federal prosecutor handling the case, Andrew S. Boutros, was appointed by Trump. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general after Pam Bondi left last April, has recused himself because he represented Trump in the litigation against Carroll.
Carroll’s case adds to those of other Trump adversaries who are increasingly facing legal trouble. The president warned during his campaigning that, if he won the election, he would take revenge on his enemies. And in a year and a half in the White House he has indeed targeted some of the people involved in the legal cases against him while he was out of the White House.
John Bolton, his former national security adviser and now one of the president’s most visible critics, was indicted in October last year on alleged offenses related to his handling of classified documents.
A grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, charged former FBI director James Comey with obstruction of justice and lying to Congress. Trump regards the former official as one of his chief enemies for having opened an investigation into connections between Russian representatives and his 2016 presidential campaign.
New York attorney general Letitia James has also been indicted for alleged mortgage fraud. James had taken the president and his family company to court in a civil fraud case in which a judge ordered the Trump Organization to pay $450 million in penalties, a decision that was later overturned by another court.
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