What Was Reid Hoffman’s Role In Funding E. Jean Carroll’s Case?

Topline

Billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman funded E. Jean Carroll’s prosecution alleging former President Donald Trump raped her, through a nonprofit group the major Democratic donor backs; now that a jury has found Trump guilty of sexual abuse, some have questioned Hoffman’s role in the process—here’s what it looked like.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 7, … [+] 2015 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Scott Olson/Getty

Key Facts

Carroll’s legal battle was funded by American Future Republic, a nonprofit group primarily backed by Hoffman, her lawyers disclosed last month.

Hoffman’s involvement in the case came to light after Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, disclosed Hoffman’s role to the Trump legal team, who then sent a letter to the judge claiming the connection to Hoffman, a big Democratic donor, called into question Carroll’s motives for suing.

The judge allowed Trump’s defense team to question Carroll about Hoffman’s funding, after Trump’s defense pointed out an October deposition in which Carroll testified no one else was paying her legal fees.

On the first day of the trial, in a since deleted Truth Social post, Trump claimed Carroll’s team attempted to hide the case was “financed by a big political donor.”

Dmirtri Mehlhorn, one of Hoffman’s philanthropic advisors, said they provide third-party funding to legal efforts to “protect our citizens from violent threats,” and in those cases the “clients generally do not know our identity.”

Mehlhorn said in Carroll’s case, the grant was made before Carroll filed suit and they had “no prior knowledge that our funding would go to support her in particular.”

After increased attention over his role in Carroll’s case, Hoffman posted on LinkedIn to defend his involvement in the case, describing his commitment to “protecting the rule of law” from the threat of Trump’s “scorched-earth legal methods,” also noting that Trump’s “hostility” to women has been a theme of his ideology for “his entire adult life.”

Hoffman pushed back against Trump’s lawyers’ description of the funding as being hidden and said he’d “never taken any steps to hide the financial support” he provided to the lawsuit.

While Hoffman is known for his work founding LinkedIn, he’s also a big Democratic donor, funding a number of Democratic causes, candidates and legal battles, including civil lawsuits filed by the victims of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to a post on LinkedIn.

News Peg

The two-week trial against Trump concluded Tuesday after a jury in New York federal court awarded Carroll $2 million in damages for sexual abuse and roughly $3 million for defamation based on the former president’s social media posts denying Carroll’s allegations.

Key Background

Carroll first disclosed her allegation that Trump raped her in a June 2019 New York Magazine article. She describes a scene where Trump attacks her in a dressing room in the department store Bergdorf Goodman. While Carroll said the assault happened in the mid-1990s, she was wasn’t able to file the claim until 2022 after the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, which allows adult sexual assault victims to file suit regardless of how long ago the incident occurred. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations and at one point said Carroll was “not my type.”

Crucial Quote

“The movement of people who are funding initiatives like this is quite large, we are prominent in it, but we are not it,” Mehlhorn said referring to the pushback Hoffman received for his funding of Carroll, pushback that mirrors that of Democratic donor George Soros, who became a talking point for many on the right. “Now is the time to stand up,” Mehlhorn said.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Hoffman is worth $2 billion from his founding of LinkedIn, which he sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in 2016, as well as his investment in Airbnb and early investment in Facebook.