NEW YORK (AP) — The former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has been battling President Donald Trump in court for nearly seven years over her allegation that he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a fancy Manhattan department store in 1996.
The fight has gone mostly in Carroll’s favor, with one jury finding Trump liable for attacking her and a second awarding her tens of millions of dollars in damages for Trump’s public attacks on her credibility.
But numerous news organizations, citing anonymous sources, have reported that Trump’s Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether Carroll lied under oath during the civil litigation. A person familiar with the matter, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry, said the perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors’ office in Chicago. That person later clarified that the actual focus was on a nonprofit that had helped fund Carroll’s case.
Late Thursday, Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, denied the reports. He issued a statement saying his office “has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”
Here’s a look at the history of the legal fight between Carroll and Trump.
Carroll’s allegations and Trump’s denials
Carroll first went public with her story about being sexually assaulted by Trump in June 2019, when an excerpt from her soon-to-be-released memoir “What Do We Need Men For?” was published in New York magazine.
In the book, she described bumping into Trump while shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, flirting with him, then physically fighting him off after he sexually assaulted her in a dressing room.
The claims drew angry denials from Trump.
“I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book — that should be sold in the fiction section,” he said in a statement.
“Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,” he said in another statement.
Carroll sues Trump for defamation
In 2019, Carroll filed a libel lawsuit against Trump, saying his claims that she made the story up had “smeared her integrity, honesty and dignity — all in the national press.”
That legal claim wound up being bogged down for years over the legal question of whether, in denying the allegations, Trump had been fulfilling his duties as president. Trump claimed that as a federal employee carrying out his job, he was shielded from the defamation lawsuit.
At the time Carroll filed the legal claim, she was barred by law from suing him over the alleged sexual assault because so many years had passed.
New York changes the law
In 2022, New York changed its laws to give sexual abuse survivors a fresh chance to sue over attacks that happened in the distant past. Carroll was one of the first people to take advantage, filing a new legal claim against Trump alleging that he had raped her. She also sued over things he had said about her after leaving the White House.
That lawsuit moved more quickly through the courts. It went to trial in New York City in 2023.
Trump chose not to attend, leaving his lawyers to argue the case on his behalf.
The jury found that while Carroll had not proved she had been raped, under New York’s definition of that crime, Trump had sexually abused her. It also found that he had made some false statements about her that had damaged her reputation. Jurors awarded Carroll $5 million.
A second trial
Months later, in January 2024, a federal judge held a second trial to determine whether other things Trump had said about Carroll were defamatory.
Its purpose was narrow. Since a jury had already found that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll, the testimony was limited to how badly Carroll’s reputation had been damaged by his comments assailing her credibility and denying the alleged attack.
This time, Trump attended the proceedings and testified for about three minutes.
“She said something that I considered to be a false accusation,” he told the jury, later adding, “I just wanted to defend myself, my family and, frankly, the presidency.”
Carroll testified that she faced a stream of death threats after Trump repeatedly attacked her story.
The new jury sided with Carroll again, awarding her more than $83 million in damages.
Appeals continue
Carroll has yet to receive any of the money while Trump’s appeals of the two verdicts have moved through the courts.
Ruling in one of those appeals, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also addressed the issue of whether Carroll had been honest about who was paying for her legal representation.
Trump’s lawyers had accused Carroll of hiding the fact that her lawyers had received money from an organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. The judges ruled that there was no evidence to suggest that Carroll was involved in that funding arrangement or had purposely lied about it when she was asked during a deposition in 2020 whether anyone was paying her legal fees.
“It showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” the appeals court said.
A lawyer for Carroll declined to comment through a spokesperson on Thursday.
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Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.
