Supreme Court Rejects Trump Bid to Overturn $5 Million E. Jean Carroll Sex-Abuse Verdict
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by President Trump of a jury verdict that awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages after finding the president had sexually abused and defamed her.
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The Court did not explain its decision and none of the justices issued a written dissent.
Attorneys for Trump had argued in their appeal that the trial judge improperly allowed testimony from two other women who said they were targets of sexual misconduct by Trump.
Carroll has alleged that Trump raped her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She first came forward with her allegations in a book excerpt published in New York magazine in 2019.
She later pursued legal action against the president, alleging in a civil suit that he had raped her and later defamed her when he denied her allegations.
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A jury ruled in May 2023 that a preponderance of evidence supported Carroll’s claims that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her, after just three hours of deliberation. The jury rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, however. But Judge Lewis Kaplan later wrote that the jury’s finding that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll by forcefully inserting his fingers was an “implicit determination that Mr. Trump digitally raped her.”
Trump did not attend his 2023 civil trial and his attorneys did not call a single witness.
Carroll’s attorneys had asked the Supreme Court to decline to take up the appeal, arguing that the arguments made in the appeal would not be grounds for the Court to overturn the jury’s verdict. She cited the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’s finding that not only was evidence from the other women properly admitted at trial, but that the outcome of the case would have been unchanged with or without it.
In a separate case in 2024, a Manhattan federal court jury found Trump liable for having defamed Carroll and ordered him to pay the former advice columnist $83.3 million. Trump is still appealing that ruling with a lower federal appeals court.
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