LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a tech billionaire with a history of funding Democratic disinformation operations and associating with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has been secretly financing a sexual assault lawsuit against former president Donald Trump since 2020.
The lawsuit was filed by former journalist E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of defamation after he denied her allegations that he sexually assaulted her at a Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s.
Hoffman has been paying Carroll’s legal bills through his nonprofit, American Future Republic, as revealed in a court filing by Trump’s lawyers on Thursday.
The trial is set to commence this month.
Hoffman’s involvement could cast Carroll’s lawsuit as a partisan attack, considering his significant donations to the Democratic party.
In 2020, he contributed $1.5 million to a super PAC supporting Joe Biden and has publicly stated his willingness to “spend as much as [he] possibly can” to prevent another Trump presidency.
Additionally, Hoffman’s affiliation with Epstein, whom he hosted at a 2015 fundraising dinner for MIT Media Lab, may further cloud the credibility of the lawsuit.
Hoffman later apologized for “helping to repair” Epstein’s image.
Trump’s legal team contends that Hoffman’s history raises “significant questions” regarding Carroll’s credibility and the possibility that the lawsuit is a “‘hoax’ that was commenced and/or continued to advance a political agenda.”
They have requested the presiding judge to postpone the trial for a month and permit discovery related to Hoffman’s support for Carroll.
Despite the ongoing lawsuit, Hoffman has maintained access to the White House, as visitor logs indicate he met twice with an assistant to top Biden adviser Anita Dunn.
Hoffman, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, has financed several dubious political operations to benefit the Democratic party.
He supported a group that created fake social media accounts to deceive Republican voters during the 2017 Alabama Senate special election.
Additionally, he was an early backer of ACRONYM, a liberal dark money group behind Courier Newsroom, a network of websites designed to resemble legitimate local news outlets while promoting liberal content.
Hoffman also donated to Integrity First for America, a progressive legal organization that provided $620,000 to the legal defense fund for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm responsible for a discredited dossier that falsely claimed the Kremlin possessed videos of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s political adviser, stated that the tech billionaire’s financial support for Carroll’s lawsuit was provided through an unidentified organization that independently selects which legal cases to fund.
Mehlhorn claimed that neither he nor Hoffman had prior knowledge that the organization would choose Carroll’s case.
The organization’s details align with Integrity First for America, the same group that contributed to Fusion GPS’s legal defense fund.
Integrity First for America was formed in 2017 by Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, to “step up the legal pressure on President Donald Trump’s business empire.”
Tax filings reveal that between 2017 and 2019, Kaplan’s law firm received nearly $4.4 million from the group.
Kaplan, who also represented Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, in an unsuccessful lawsuit over family inheritance, has been involved in other sex scandals.
She was forced to resign as head of feminist group Time’s Up after it was disclosed that she advised then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D.) on a planned op-ed to discredit a woman who accused him of sexual harassment.