The Supreme Court has refused to hear Donald Trump’s appeal in the E. Jean Carroll case. The $5 million jury verdict against him still stands. The justices’ decision on Monday closes the door on Trump’s bid to overturn a jury’s finding that he sexually abused and later defamed writer Carroll.
Supreme Court denies Donald Trump’s request to overturn E. Jean Carroll case
By declining to take up the case, the Supreme Court left the 2023 jury verdict and the accompanying $5 million civil judgment fully intact. At the heart of the case was E. Jean Carroll’s claim that Donald Trump assaulted her decades ago, in 1996, inside a dressing room at a New York department store. A second strand of the case dealt with defamation. Trump made comments years after leaving office, publicly rejecting her account as a “con job” and a “hoax.”
Trump reacted angrily on Truth Social, vowing to keep fighting with all his might. However, the Supreme Court’s refusal leaves him with essentially no legal case. Trump also pushed back on the idea that he and Carroll had ever crossed paths. The president called her “a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!).” It was a reference to a photo that later surfaced of the two of them together, which undercut his earlier denials. That contradiction played a direct role in the jury siding with Carroll on the defamation claim.
Furthermore, Donald Trump framed the case as bigger than himself, writing that it was “really against the United States of America, and all it stands for.” Trump argued it “should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be.” He called the outcome an “injustice” that “cannot be allowed to stand.”
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said the Supreme Court’s decision “affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict,” noting that Trump’s “multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed” and that the ruling “ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions” (via NBC News).
