Trump sics DOJ on woman he raped
E. Jean Carroll was always the final boss in the president's revenge tour against women.
Barely a week after Donald Trump stole $1.8 billion from taxpayers to create a slush fund, called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” that will compensate supposed victims of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, Trump has weaponized his own DOJ against columnist E. Jean Carroll as revenge for her accusing him of rape.
Three years after she beat him in court twice over claims of rape and then defamation, Trump’s DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury in 2022. Prosecutors are trying to prove that she lied in a deposition for her civil rape case against Trump when she said that she was receiving no outside funding for her legal fees, when six months later her team disclosed that she was now receiving some legal financial assistance from billionaire Reid Hoffman. Of course, it’s fully possible that Carroll was not receiving the funds when she gave the deposition and only later accepted the help from Hoffman, considering that Trump’s lawyer at the time—now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (lol)—never brought up this supposed perjury by the plaintiff while the case was underway.
What’s clear is that Trump despises E. Jean Carroll, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, because she publicly labeled him a rapist and won $88 million in damages. He keeps trying to appeal the damages that he’s supposed to pay her, which the Supreme Court has deferred now 12 times, claiming he couldn’t have raped her because she’s “not my type.” He called her a liar 26 times in unhinged social media rants after a jury had found him liable for rape, which only led to him having to pay her exponentially more money. And when Carroll won her defamation case against him, she called the verdict “a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.” That set her up as the final boss of Trump’s ultimate revenge tour against women.
I wrote a column for The Cut back when Trump was assembling the rape-iest possible cabinet late in 2024 that his second term appeared to be revenge for the whole Me Too movement. Trump pointedly nominated multiple people—Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr., and Linda McMahon among them—who also either faced rape and sexual abuse allegations themselves or were accused of enabling the sexual abuse of kids. Trump has now pushed out four cabinet members, all of them women, to replace them with men—including Pam Bondi, whom he believed wasn’t weaponizing the DOJ effectively enough against his enemies. But Hegseth, Kennedy, and McMahon are still up there running the country, and the lawyer with the biggest personal vendetta against E. Jean Carroll is now running the Justice Department.
We’ve become almost desensitized to the casual misogyny of this administration and its followers, because there are so many battles to fight right now. But the headlines should all be shocking on their own: The Students for Trump cofounder was just arrested for punching a woman in the face; Hegseth is methodically purging women from the military and from military history; Trump yelled “quiet piggy” at a female reporter and is still trying to disenfranchise married women; red state doctors are letting women die from miscarriages because they’ve been told to prioritize the fetus. And now Trump is using the full weight of the DOJ to punish the woman he raped for daring to open her mouth about it.
What the president perhaps doesn’t realize is that all he’s accomplishing with this transparently bogus “criminal probe” is putting E. Jean Carroll back into national headlines a few months before the midterms. He’s reminding voters for absolutely no reason at all, with his poll numbers already circling the drain, that there’s a woman out there who accused him of rape and won. He’s making his “anti-weaponization fund” look even more hypocritical and ridiculous in process. And when this investigation comes up empty, I fear he’s going to implode.