DOJ Investigating Trump Accuser E. Jean Carroll for Perjury
The Justice Department is investigating E. Jean Carroll, the kooky columnist who prevailed in two lawsuits against President Trump.
DOJ is investigating whether Carroll lied during a deposition in 2022, CNN disclosed today, when she said that no one was funding her cases. Truth was, far-left hate-Trump billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her legal cause.
Carroll’s claims of sexual assault always sounded fishy for myriad reasons, notably that they sounded like an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. As well, Trump was not permitted to introduce video of Carroll’s admitting that her putative encounter with Trump “was not sexual.”
Carroll’s Claims
Carroll, 82, sued Trump in 2019 in U.S. District Court, accusing the president of raping her in a dressing room at the ritzy Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City in 1995 or 1996, allegations she published in a book and in New York Magazine.
Trump, she wrote, importuned her to try on a “lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray,” then trapped her in the dressing room and raped her.
Carroll described the assault this way:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts [himself] halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
Yet, she says, that does not describe rape. Rather, it was a “fight.”
“Every woman gets to choose her word,” she told The New York Times about the encounter. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it…. My word is fight, my word is not the victim one. I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought.”
During an interview, she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper much the same thing.
“I was not thrown on the ground and ravaged,” she told him. “The word rape carries so many sexual connotations. This was not sexual. It just hurt.”
As well, she told Cooper, “I think most people think of rape as being sexy.”
Another reason why what Trump supposedly did wasn’t rape: Calling it rape would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection,” she told MSNBC talker Lawrence O’Donnell.
The Lawsuits
But $5 million wasn’t enough for Carroll, who admitted during an interview that her attorneys ensured that she wore 1990s clothing and dolled her up to make her look “f**kable.” Her appearance during trial “was a trick,” she confessed.
In November 2022, she sued Trump in federal court for defamation and won again. In January 2024, a nine-member jury awarded her $83.3 million. Early this month, a higher court ruled that Trump could delay payment until the U.S. Supreme Court hears an appeal. Trump must post a bond that covers interest pending the high court’s review.
In that case, far-left Democratic U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, appointed by President Bill Clinton, would not permit Trump to introduce the Anderson Cooper interview as evidence.
In December last year, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s appeal of the lower court’s verdict. Three far-left judges appointed by Biden and President Barack Obama — two women and one Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong — rejected Trump’s claim that the lower federal court permitted the jury to hear inappropriate evidence.
Perjury?
Now, Trump wants payback.
“Prosecutors’ theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement by Carroll, 82, that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses,” CNN reported.
“In a 2022 videotaped deposition, Carroll told then-Trump attorney Alina Habba that no one else was paying for her legal fees” the hate-Trump network continued:
But two weeks before the trial Carroll’s attorneys informed the judge and Trump’s lawyers that they secured funding from Hoffman’s nonprofit.
Carroll’s lawyers said she never met nor had conversations with anyone associated with the nonprofit. Habba said in court at the time that Carroll’s team “conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months.”
The judge permitted Trump’s attorneys to question Carroll again in a deposition, which has not been made public.
When the trial began two weeks later Judge Lewis Kaplan said he saw no issue with Carroll’s credibility and blocked the lawyers from asking about Hoffman’s funding.
Multiple news outlets noted that the perjury probe is Trump’s exacting vengeance, comparing it to cases against far-left New York Attorney General Letitia James and disgraced former FBI chief James Comey.
Law & Order: SVU
As for the rape allegation, Carroll’s story, critics note, sounds suspiciously like an episode of Law & Order: SVU that aired in 2012, which Carroll claimed was merely an “astonishing coincidence.”
And despite Trump’s attack, in 2012, Carroll wrote that she was a “MASSIVE” fan of Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice.
The octogenarian columnist named her cat Vagina T. Fireball. The jury in the first case never heard that interesting tidbit, either.
