Is There Anything More Foul than Siccing the Justice Department on Your Own Sexual Abuse Victim?

Whether or not the President of the United States, Donald Trump, was legally found to have sexually abused former magazine writer E. Jean Carroll is not a topic with any room for debate: He was. A New York jury weighed the evidence of the assault on Carroll that occurred in the mid-1990s in an NYC department store, and found in 2023 that Trump had, without question, forced himself upon the woman. The only reason the verdict of the civil lawsuit did not technically include the word “rape” is that the jury merely found that Trump had, in the words of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, “convincingly established … that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” which somehow does not count as “rape” in the eyes of New York state law, but merely “sexual abuse.” And then, you know, the American people ignored that result, as well as Carroll successfully suing Trump again for defamation, and returned him to the White House so he could seek revenge on all his enemies with impunity, Carroll included. The 2024 election, everybody: America’s finest hour.

And now, the revenge tour has landed at the door of E. Jean Carroll, as numerous outlets have reported that she is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Trump-dominated Justice Department. Not with some kind of goal of overturning the results of her own lawsuits against him, mind you–although Trump has been leaning on the U.S. Supreme Court to do exactly that for years, as the Court has repeatedly deferred on getting involved. Rather, the new DOJ investigation of Carroll is said to center around accusations of perjury, essentially accusing Carroll of having misrepresented the financial backing of her lawsuit against Trump while on the stand by failing to acknowledge having received the financial backing of Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Trump critic.

E. Jean Carroll didn’t just “accuse” Trump of sexual assault. She won a civil lawsuit against Trump for sexual assault. A jury found that Trump sexually assaulted her. She deserves for us to call it what it is.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) 10:55 PM · May 27, 2026

These accusations have some history, as Trump’s lawyers during the previous trial, led by the fabulously competent Alina Habba, attempted then to make the case that the testimony of E. Jean Carroll was inherently lacking in credibility because of her failure to acknowledge Hoffman’s backing on the stand. Habba claimed at the time that Carroll’s team had “conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months,” but after considering the questioning and the facts of the case, Judge Kaplan decreed that he saw no problems with Carroll’s general credibility in describing the events of what happened to her during Trump’s assault in the 1990s. She would go on to prevail in the case, being awarded $5 million in the sexual abuse case by the jury, and eventually a whopping $83 million judgement in her successful defamation case against Trump, which she waged after he continued to call her story a hoax and a lie on social media even after the jury had decided the case in her favor. Carroll has occasionally threatened to sue Trump a third time for defamation once again, given his chronic inability to shut up about his losses. Shockingly, he has yet to pay a single dollar of the damages to Carroll, as the POTUS/sexual abuser continues to hide behind appeals and the protections of his office.

This practical immunity to consequence, however, is clearly not enough for Trump: As an egomaniacal sadist, he also needs to see anyone who crossed him in any way actively suffering. That means going directly after E. Jean Carroll in exactly the same way as the Justice Department was corralled into prosecuting James Comey for Instagramming a photo of seashells on the beach, or the previously failed cases against both Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, which were both thrown out by a judge after it was ruled that the Trump administration couldn’t simply invent a new U.S. Attorney in the form of Lindsey Halligan. The Carroll prosecution, however, is a particularly obvious conflict of interest for the Trump-dominated DOJ, particularly given acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s past status as one of Trump’s own personal lawyers. Blanche has already reportedly recused himself from this case, the investigation of which has been placed into the hands of Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

So yeah, nothing to see here–just a U.S. attorney appointed by the President, heading a criminal investigation of the woman that a jury found was sexually abused by that same President. Who could possibly misconstrue such a criminal investigation as being vindictive or personal in nature?

There is not a grand jury in America that will indict E. Jean Carroll.

We see you.

— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) 10:08 PM · May 27, 2026

The legacy of the second Trump administration has already been littered with countless incidents of the President abusing the absolute power of his office for the most petty of personal reasons, but conspiring to wield the entire Justice Department against the woman that you were LEGALLY FOUND TO HAVE ATTACKED might be the single grossest thing that the man has done to date on a personal level, the most obviously reeking in destructive narcissism. It could not possibly be more obvious to the objective outside observer that this prosecution is about nothing more than petty vengeance. We can only hope that is so blindingly obvious that no jury or judge, no matter how corrupt, will be able to deny it.