The Supreme Court rebuffed President Trump’s request Monday to reconsider its refusal to hear his appeal of a $5 million award to writer E. Jean Carroll in connection with her civil suit accusing Trump of sexual abuse and defamation.
The justices almost never grant such rehearing requests and Trump, 80, paid $5.63 million — the judgment amount, plus interest — soon after the court initially declined to hear his appeal in June.
“We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Carroll 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.”
The high court is also weighing Trump’s appeal of a separate $83.3 million jury verdict for defaming Carroll in 2019, during his first term as president, when he denied the claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations.
Trump’s lawyers in that appeal argue that presidential immunity shields him from Carroll’s claims and that lower courts wrongly decided that he had forfeited that defense.
The president’s team argues the issue of official immunity from the $83.3 million award — a matter the justices still could decide to take up — impacts the other verdict as well.
The court is not expected to act on that appeal until later this year.
Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan around 1996.
The president has denied the allegations — at one point insisting that Carroll was “not my type” — and contended the suits were decided by unfair juries.
The case that led to the $5 million verdict concerned Trump’s statements in 2022, when he called Carroll’s claim a “hoax” and a “con job” in a post on social media.
Jurors in that case decided in 2023 that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, but did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
In a landmark 2024 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have full immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office that were within their core constitutional powers as president.
The Carroll cases are civil lawsuits.
With Post wires
