The Supreme Court declined Monday to consider President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the $5 million verdict from a jury that found he sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and later defamed her.
This is the second time Trump asked the Supreme Court to consider his appeal. The president will have to pay the more than $5 million in damages he owes Carroll stemming from a 2023 civil trial that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The high court denied Trump’s request — along with a list of other cases — as part of its scheduled “summer order lists.” The justices did not provide any explanation for why they declined to take up Trump’s appeal, which is consistent with Supreme Court practice.
“We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote in a statement. “As a result, the jury’s unanimous verdict that Donald Trump sexually assaulted and then defamed E. Jean Carroll is now final and cannot be challenged in any court.”
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Trump had asked the Supreme Court to reconsider his appeal because it’s connected to a judgment of $83 million against the president in a separate defamation case filed by Carroll. Trump petitioned the Supreme Court to toss out that judgment as well, and that case remains pending.
The smaller $5 million judgement resulted from a lawsuit Carroll filed in 2022. The columnist alleged Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996 and detailed the incident in her 2019 memoir. Trump has vigorously denied the accusation, telling a reporter from The Hill in 2019 that “she’s not my type.”
Trump has now exhausted his appeals in this case, and lawyers for Carroll told The Associated Press she had collected the full judgement last month.
“The Eagle has landed,” Carroll wrote on X, shortly after the news broke that she received the compensatory damages.
In a court filing submitted after the Supreme Court issued its first rejection of the president’s appeal on June 29, Carroll’s lawyers argued that Trump had hindered payment by “slow-roll[ing] his defenses, asserting or inventing a new one each time his prior effort to delay the case fails.”
Trump maintains that Carroll falsified the accusation.
“I’ve never met this person in my life,” Trump said in a statement in 2019. “She is trying to sell a new book; that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
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