A years-long legal battle between former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and former U.S. President Donald Trump has reached a new turning point, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s bid to overturn a civil jury verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, prompting Carroll’s legal team to demand immediate payment of the nearly $5.8 million in awarded damages.
The core of the dispute stretches back to the mid-1990s, when Carroll, now 80, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her inside a fitting room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The case moved forward decades later, culminating in a 2023 civil trial in New York, where a jury reached a verdict that Trump was responsible for the abuse, and additionally found him liable for defamation after he publicly labeled Carroll’s accusations a fabricated hoax on his social platform Truth Social. The jury initially awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
Trump immediately launched a series of appeals to challenge the verdict, arguing that the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, had incorrectly permitted damaging evidence to be presented to the jury that unfairly skewed the panel’s perception of him. His appeal was rejected by a federal appeals court last year, which ruled that Kaplan had not committed any legal errors that would justify overturning the jury’s decision or ordering a new trial. On Monday this week, the nation’s highest court declined to take up Trump’s appeal for review, closing off this final avenue of appeal for the former president in this specific case.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Carroll’s legal team filed a new court motion on Tuesday asking a judge to compel Trump to release the full damages payment. With accumulated interest added to the original award, the total sum owed now stands at roughly $5.8 million. In the motion, Carroll’s attorneys noted that they had granted all of Trump’s prior requests to delay payment throughout the appeals process, but that cooperation would end now that all legal challenges had been exhausted. “Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today,” the filing read. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”
Carroll’s legal team also added a new piece of evidence to their filing: a Truth Social post Trump published on Monday immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, in which he repeated his claim that the entire case was a “fake” brought against him through partisan “lawfare.” “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a fake case brought against me,” Trump wrote, adding that he would continue to fight the “weaponization and lawfare case” including “the ridiculous claim of defamation, with all of my power and strength.”
This is not the only defamation case Trump has lost to Carroll. In a separate 2024 civil trial, another jury found Trump liable for a second instance of defamation related to additional comments he made about Carroll, awarding her nearly $84 million in damages. Trump also appealed that ruling, but a panel of federal judges rejected his appeal last year.
The BBC has reached out to Trump’s legal team for a response to Carroll’s latest motion, and has not yet received a comment.
This legal confrontation comes as Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces a string of ongoing criminal and civil legal challenges across the country, many of which he has repeatedly labeled as politically motivated witch hunts.