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Trump is turning the organs of the state against his personal enemies. Look at E Jean Carroll | Moira Donegan

Donald Trump is accused of raping E Jean Carroll, the magazine writer, in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store sometime in the mid-1990s. Trump denies this, as he denies all the sexual abuse allegations that have been made against him by more than two dozen women, but he was found to have sexually abused Carroll by a federal jury; later, another jury found that he defamed her when he said that she had lied about it. She didn’t lie.

Trump has vowed to appeal the rulings, but he’s so far been frustrated: a federal court panel declined to hear his appeal of one verdict, and the US supreme court has so far delayed a decision on whether to hear another of his appeals in the matter no fewer than 12 times. She won two judgments from Trump: $5m for sexual abuse and defamation, and more than $83m for defamation. The president has used his office to enrich himself so blatantly that he almost certainly has the money to pay her. But Carroll hasn’t seen a dime; it’s not clear that she ever will.

Trump has waged a long campaign of retaliation and harassment against Carroll, continuing his abuse with a series of public statements that derided her character and her appearance in vicious, ad hominem terms. He famously claimed that he could not have raped Carroll because she was “not my type”; an appeals court found that Trump had “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” against Carroll.

Now, those attacks have escalated further, as Trump deploys the power of the federal government against the same woman he has been harassing for years. On Wednesday, CNN was the first to report that the justice department was launching a criminal investigation into Carroll, yet another instance of the organs of the state being turned against Trump’s personal enemies.

The prosecutors’ claims, such as they are, go like this: Carroll’s legal battles against Trump, which have been ongoing since 2019, have been funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder, who is paying for Carroll to be represented by the kind of attorneys who do not take on such cases out of an abundance of charity or an overflow of personal principle. In a 2022 deposition, Carroll, who is now 82, said that she didn’t receive any support for her lawsuit. Such alleged false statements are par for the course in civil litigation; they are almost never criminally pursued. But now, it is this inaccuracy that forms the unusually flimsy pretext for the criminal investigation, wherein justice department prosecutors who have mistaken their offices for those of Trump errand boys are seeking to put an old woman through a retaliatory legal ordeal – for Trump’s own personal sadistic purposes, but at taxpayer expense.

The deployment of the Department of Justice to harass and punish Carroll represents a grim fusion of two longstanding trends: Donald Trump’s deployment of federal agencies in his campaign of retribution against his personal enemies, and the post-#MeToo use of retaliatory legal proceedings by allegedly abusive men against the women who say they were raped and assaulted.

Since his return to power last year, Trump has deployed the once-independent Department of Justice to concoct flimsy pretenses to pursue prosecutions of people who investigated, sued, embarrassed or otherwise displeased him. A criminal inquiry was opened into Letitia James, the New York attorney general, after her office successfully pursued a civil fraud case against the Trump Organization.

Federal prosecutors in Washington DC briefly pursued a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair who had clashed with Trump over monetary policy. John Bolton, a Trump critic and former national security adviser, was indicted over alleged mishandling of classified information. And in an especially embarrassing case, the former FBI director and Trump critic James Comey has been subjected to a criminal inquiry over a photo he posted on social media, which depicted the numbers “86-47” spelled out on a beach in seashells.

But the criminal investigation of Carroll also exemplifies another trend, one which Trump’s return to power has vindicated and emboldened but which he had thus far not used the power of the state to pursue: the use of retaliatory legal proceedings, instigated by allegedly abusive men, as tools of punishment and harassment against women who came forward with accounts of sexual violence. Since the #MeToo era, when many women disclosed their past experiences of sexual violence and some men lost jobs or public respect as a result, the use of defamation lawsuits, in particular, has been used to silence women, to punish their disclosures, and to intimidate others into silence.

Johnny Depp’s highly publicized trial against Amber Heard was merely the most prominent example of a growing trend, in which allegedly abusive men drag women through costly, invasive, humiliating and often years-long legal ordeals in retaliation for coming forward – lawsuits that preserve a man’s contact with the woman he allegedly abused, preserve his power over her and drain her resources.

Together, the two projects that merge in the investigation into Carroll (the use of the federal government to silence and punish Trump’s enemies, and the use of retaliatory lawsuits to silence and punish sexual violence victims) are two sides of the same coin: an attempt to reassert control over reality, to punish dissenting voices, and to establish the authority of abusive men – or, here, one abusive man in particular – to dictate what is true and what is false.

They are attempts to use the state, the courts and the law to dictate who counts and who doesn’t, who has the privilege of silencing inconvenient facts for the sake of their own interests, who gets to define reality and whose reality gets to be pushed into marginality and irrelevance.

Trump has long claimed this power over reality for himself – he claimed this power when he first defamed E Jean Carroll, and he claimed it when he first decried all unflattering reporting on him to be “fake news”. Unfortunately for him, reality itself does not work this way: the public can still see when he is lying, can still judge for themselves and understand what this man is and what he has done. The facts, it turns out, do not care about his feelings.