Dem Megadonor Is Secretly Funding Rape Lawsuit Against Donald Trump

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LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has secretly paid E. Jean Carroll’s legal fees since 2020

Reid Hoffman/Getty Images

A tech billionaire with a history of funding Democratic disinformation operations and ties to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has secretly funded a sexual assault case against former president Donald Trump.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has since 2020 paid legal fees for former journalist E. Jean Carroll through his nonprofit, American Future Republic, Trump’s lawyers disclosed in a court filing Thursday . Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he denied her allegation that he sexually assaulted her at a Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s. The trial for the case is scheduled to begin this month.

Hoffman’s involvement could further paint Carroll’s lawsuit as a partisan attack. A major Democratic donor, Hoffman in 2020 gave $1.5 million to a super PAC supporting Joe Biden and said he would “spend up to [he] possibly can’ to avoid another Trump presidency.” Carroll’s case may also be clouded by Hoffman’s connection to Epstein, whom he hosted in 2015 at a fundraising dinner for the MIT Media Lab. Later has the tech titan apologize for “helping fix” Epstein’s image.

Trump’s lawyers asserted that Hoffman’s past antics raised “significant questions” about Carroll’s credibility and whether the lawsuit was a “‘hoax’ initiated and/or perpetuated in furtherance of a political agenda.” They asked the judge handling the case to delay the trial for a month and allow discovery related to Hoffman’s support for Carroll. Hoffman maintained access to the White House throughout the case. Visitor logs show he met twice with an assistant to top Biden adviser Anita Dunn.

Hoffman, who serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, has funded several questionable political operations to boost Democrats. He funded a group that created fake social media accounts to deceive Republican voters during the Alabama Senate special election in 2017. Hoffman was an early supporter of ACRONYM, a liberal dark money group behind the Courier Newsroom, a network of liberal websites deceptively designed to look like legitimate local news outlets.

Hoffman contributed to Integrity First for America, a progressive legal group that gave $620,000 to the legal defense fund for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind an infamous dossier that falsely claimed the Kremlin had video of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser for Hoffman, said in a statement that Hoffman’s financial support for Carroll’s lawsuit was made through an anonymous organization that independently chooses whose legal cases to fund. Mehlhorn said he and Hoffman had “no prior knowledge” that the group would choose Carroll’s case.

Mehlhorn did not identify the organization, but the details match Integrity First for America, the legal group that contributed to Fusion GPS’s legal defense fund.

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, formed Integrity First for America in 2017 to “increase legal pressure on President Donald Trump’s business empire.” Integrity First paid Kaplan’s law firm nearly $4.4 million from 2017 to 2019, according to tax filings.

Kaplan, who also represented Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, in her failed lawsuit over the family’s multimillion-dollar inheritance, has been at the center of other sex scandals. He was forced to resign as head of the feminist group Time’s Up after revelations that he advised then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D.) on an op-ed he planned to write defaming a woman who had accused him of sexual harassment.

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