The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago is not investigating E. Jean Carroll for perjury, the office’s top federal prosecutor said Thursday, undercutting earlier reports that the Justice Department was examining whether Carroll lied during her civil lawsuits against President Donald Trump. Instead, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that the investigation actually concerns a nonprofit that helped fund Carroll’s litigation.
The shifting descriptions of the probe cap a legal saga that has already produced two civil judgments against Trump, and come as the Justice Department under his administration faces scrutiny over its handling of matters involving the president’s adversaries and their financial backers.
Carroll, a former advice columnist, has been in court against Trump for nearly seven years over her allegation that he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in 1996. In 2023, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and a second jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages in 2024 after concluding that Trump had continued to defame her.
On Wednesday, numerous news organizations, citing anonymous sources, reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into whether Carroll perjured herself during the civil cases. The AP separately spoke with a person familiar with the matter, who said the probe is being led by federal prosecutors in Chicago. That person later clarified that the actual subject of the investigation is a nonprofit that provided financial backing for Carroll’s lawsuit, not Carroll’s own testimony.
The next day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago publicly addressed the reports. Andrew Boutros, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, told reporters that his office is not investigating Carroll, according to accounts published by multiple news outlets, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The statement appeared to confirm that any active investigatory work in the Chicago office does not target Carroll personally, though the office did not comment on whether a probe into a funding organization was underway.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to provide additional details, and Boutros’s office did not issue a formal written statement beyond what was described in media accounts. The nonprofit at the center of the inquiry has not been publicly identified.
The episode is the latest flashpoint in the long-running conflict between Carroll and Trump, which has repeatedly intersected with questions about the Justice Department’s independence. During Trump’s first term, his administration’s Justice Department attempted to substitute itself as the defendant in Carroll’s lawsuit, arguing that Trump had been acting in his official capacity when he denied her allegations. A federal judge rejected that effort in 2020.
Legal observers have noted that the existence of a criminal inquiry into the financing of a successful civil plaintiff against a sitting president is highly unusual, and that even an investigation into a third-party funder could chill support for future litigants. Neither the White House nor Trump’s legal team has commented on the matter.