President Donald Trump will have to pay $5 million to former columnist E. Jean Carroll in a sexual abuse and defamation case after losing a second time in federal appellate court.
On Friday morning, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the president’s bid to have the full court review a three-judge panel’s 2024 decision, which said that a federal judge had not made any mistakes that warranted a new trial.
“Simply re-litigating a case is not an appropriate use of the en banc procedure,” wrote Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez, who was joined by three colleagues. All four women were Biden administration appointees.
But Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he sexually abused Carroll decades ago in a Manhattan department store and repeatedly defamed her has tied up the case for years.
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Trump was quickly found liable for sexual abuse by a full jury of New Yorkers after a nine-day trial in 2023 — followed by a second jury in 2024 concluding he should pay an additional $83 million for lying to deny it and harming Carroll’s reputation. As he managed a presidential comeback campaign and fended off several criminal cases, Trump has been delaying the matter on appeals.
Now that he’s back in the Oval Office —effectively ending all criminal investigations against him, the sexual abuse case remains one of the few that could personally affect him while in office — or stretch on beyond his time in the White House.
The question now is whether the Supreme Court will get involved. Trump’s litigation strategy is to delay whenever possible and appeal every unfavorable decision, so a trip to the high court is expected.
A disagreement among the appellate judges who reviewed the matter that ran along political lines could entice the Supreme Court to step in. Two circuit judges said they would have had the full appeals court rehear the case, Steven J. Menashi and Michael H. Park — both appointed by Trump during his first administration.
In a lengthy dissent, the pair criticized the trial for “permitting stale witness testimony about a brief encounter that allegedly occurred forty-five years earlier.” Those judges noted that an existing court rule “authorizes the admission of evidence that the defendant committed a ‘crime’ of ‘sexual assault,’” but that the circuit panel read that “to allow testimony about prior acts that were neither crimes nor sexual assaults.”
Trump has remained unapologetic about the 1990s encounter, which he denies, and his ongoing feud with Carroll, a celebrated magazine advice columnist. Even after the jury verdicts, Trump continued to insult Carroll in public — most notably at a CNN town hall in 2023 shortly after the first trial. More recently, he has used the legal technicalities of the verdict to exert control over the press, reaching a settlement of $15 million from ABC News after suing over the way anchor George Stephanopoulos asserted on-air that Trump had been “found liable for rape.”
In an opinion written after the trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan observed: “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
“This jury did not award Ms. Carroll more than $2 million for groping her breasts through her clothing, wrongful as that might have been,” the judge continued. “Instead, the proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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