E. Jean Carroll‘s podcast rant last week — in which she bragged it was “delicious” to extract $83 million from Donald Trump — may go down as one of the most revealing moments of political theater in years. Not because it shocked anyone who has followed her story, but because it finally made clear what her lawsuit always was: a coordinated hit job.
Behind her giddy theatrics lies a much darker and more powerful figure: Reid Hoffman, Silicon Valley billionaire and current Microsoft board member, who secretly funded Carroll’s lawsuit. NLPC has called for Hoffman’s ouster — and Carroll’s unhinged rant is the latest proof of why.
Carroll’s Credibility Was Always in Question
Carroll’s allegations go back to the 1990s. She said Trump assaulted her in a department store, but never filed a police report or told anyone in real time. When pressed, she admitted the idea reminded her of an episode of Law & Order: SVU. In interviews she has said that “rape is sexy.” Her timeline was faulty, as her supposed outfit from the day she was allegedly assaulted didn’t even exist yet.
She won anyway — because New York Democrats rigged the legal playing field with a special law that revived old sexual misconduct claims for one year. With a partisan jury and a Clinton-appointed judge, she was awarded over $83 million.
Reid Hoffman: Money, Manipulation, and Martyr Fantasies
Carroll didn’t bankroll her crusade alone. She was funded by Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a Democratic kingmaker. Hoffman’s hatred of Trump is legendary — he even wished once that he could have made Trump an “actual martyr,” not long before the assassination attempt against the former and would-be president, for which he subsequently tried to backpedal from and then blame-shift.
Hoffman funded Carroll’s lawsuit to the tune of millions. Why? Because as the significant circumstantial and verbalized evidence has shown, it was about keeping Trump out of power.
This is the same man who funded a fake conservative campaign in Alabama during the 2018 midterms, a disinformation op so dishonest it prompted public apologies. He’s also tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s circle and visited the pedophile’s private island — a fact Hoffman tries to downplay.
Yet he remains on Microsoft’s board, influencing one of the world’s most important companies.
NLPC: Hoffman Must Be Removed
NLPC has demanded Microsoft’s board and its shareholders to take action. We wrote the directors in October 2023 asking for them to remove Hoffman from his board role. Also, our SEC filings in 2023 and again in 2024 extensively outlined Hoffman’s extremist behavior, political conflicts, and reputational risk, and requested fellow Microsoft investors to vote against him for re-election to the board. Our call was echoed by other shareholders as well.
The giggle-fest on the podcast by Carroll — who has yet to receive her civil judgment money — was the final straw. Here is a lengthier excerpt of her comments, courtesy of the Daily Caller News Foundation:
I know my own pleasures, and … that doesn’t involve buying things. Where my pleasure comes is making him so pissed off he can’t think. We need to prick his little balloon constantly, and one of the ways to do that is to give his money to women’s reproductive rights. To binding up the wounds of democracy, which he is destroying by the very instant that we’re sitting here. Shoring up voting rights — can you imagine how angry he takes this?
Well, he made $600 million last year on Bitcoin. And as [Carroll’s lawyer] Robbie [Kaplan] says, do you know anybody except criminals who make money on Bitcoin? No. Do we? We don’t. Anyway, so it’s just so delicious thinking about how pissed off he’ll be, how angry that his own personal money is going to help women. Ah, heaven. Heaven. It’s the revenge that we all love.
Carroll’s lawsuit was a travesty and the political machinations that made it possible were over-the-top. If Microsoft’s board is serious about corporate ethics and fiduciary duty, they cannot continue to allow Hoffman’s obsessive political agenda to steer their governance.
He’s not just a political donor — he’s a liability.
