NEW YORK —
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 first went public with her story about being sexually assaulted by Trump in June 2019, when an excerpt from her...
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