US Supreme Court Again Rejects Trump Appeal in $5 Million E. Jean Carroll Case

 

The US Supreme Court has for a second time declined to hear President Donald Trump’s appeal against a $5 million civil verdict in favour of E. Jean Carroll, after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former magazine columnist.

 

The justices rejected Trump’s request on Monday to reconsider their previous decision in June denying his appeal against the 2023 jury verdict. The case arose from Carroll’s allegation that Trump raped her in the 1990s in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the trial was unfair.

 

The court’s order was unsigned and gave no explanation. The Supreme Court rarely grants requests for reconsideration.

 

The justices are also considering Trump’s appeal against a separate $83.3 million jury verdict for defaming Carroll in 2019, during his first term as president. Trump had denied her allegations and said she had lied. In that appeal, his lawyers argue that presidential immunity protects him from Carroll’s claims and that lower courts wrongly ruled that he had forfeited that defence.

 

Trump has been embroiled in legal battles with Carroll since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 alleging that he raped her around 1996 in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan.

 

Trump denied Carroll’s claims in 2019 and again in 2022, when he was out of office, and accused her of lying about the allegations.

 

The case resulting in the $5 million verdict concerned Trump’s statements in 2022, when he described Carroll’s claim as a “hoax” and a “con job” in a social media post. Jurors in 2023 found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, but did not find that he had raped her, as she had alleged.

 

“We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said 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,” Kaplan said.

 

After the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeal in June, Carroll collected nearly $5.63 million from Trump. The amount included the original $5 million civil verdict plus interest.

 

In his request for rehearing, Trump’s lawyers argued that the issue of presidential immunity raised in the case involving the $83.3 million verdict, which the justices could still decide to hear, could also affect the 2023 verdict.

 

The Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 2024 decision that former presidents have full immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office that fall within their core constitutional powers as president. The Carroll cases, however, are civil lawsuits.

 

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