The U.S. Supreme Court again rejected President Donald Trump's attempt to overturn a $5 million jury verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former magazine columnist. According to The Associated Press, the justices declined to hear his appeal on Monday, marking an unusual move as it's unusual - although not unheard of - for the court to grant such requests. The court had previously declined to hear Trump's appeal in June, and Trump paid the judgment shortly after that decision. The case concerned allegations that Trump raped Carroll in the mid-1990s in a Manhattan department store's dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower.
The Supreme 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. As reported by The Associated Press, Trump and the Justice Department are asking the high court to toss out this second Carroll verdict, arguing that he's immune from being sued over comments he made about her in 2019 when he was president. 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.
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. According to The Associated Press, 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. Trump has denied any wrongdoing throughout the proceedings. Following the Supreme Court's denial in June of Trump's appeal, Carroll collected nearly $5.63 million from Trump, representing the original $5 million civil verdict plus interest. 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.
In Trump's request for rehearing, his lawyers said that the issue of presidential immunity in the case that led to the $83.3 million verdict that a jury reached in 2024 — which the justices still could decide to take up — could impact the 2023 verdict as well. As reported by The Associated Press, the Supreme Court in a landmark 2024 decision 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, making the immunity question particularly relevant for these proceedings. The president has contended that the suits were decided by unfair juries and has denied the allegations at one point insisting that Carroll was 'not my type'.
