Trump’s legal team has questioned for years who’s funding E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit. Now they finally know.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Updated Apr. 13, 2023 11:35PM ET / Published Apr. 13, 2023 1:44PM ET
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire behind LinkedIn who’s now a megadonor to Democrats, has been quietly bankrolling E. Jean Carroll’s rape case against former President Donald Trump, according to court records filed Thursday.
The surprising last-minute disclosures came out in contentious correspondence between lawyers for the aggrieved journalist and the pissed off former president, who are battling over whether to delay the trial scheduled to start in two weeks.
While it’s unclear if that payment arrangement has any material impact on the case itself, the fact that it remained secret until now will surely support Trump’s unrelenting, conspiratorial complaints that ultra rich liberals have been pulling the strings on the efforts to take him down.
Hoffman is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded the professional social network LinkedIn. In recent years, Vox also identified him as a major Democratic donor who has made it his mission to loosen Trump’s control over the Republican Party. According to Insider, Hoffman’s distaste for Trump’s authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies has even strained his personal relationship with another Silicon Valley staple, Peter Thiel, who has conversely fashioned himself as a bankroller of right-wing causes.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll’s lawyer, responded Thursday evening by giving the Trump team some of what it requested—but not everything.
He wrote that the payment issue “has nothing directly to do with the ultimate merits of the case” but that it “might prove relevant to the question of [Carroll's] credibility” at trial. He gave her team until Sunday to turn over financial documents, and said Trump’s lawyers can subject her to yet another round of questions at a one-hour deposition by next Wednesday. Buthe sternly maintained that he plans to proceed with the trial on April 25.
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