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........

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