The U.S. Supreme Court has for a second time turned away a legal request from former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, who sought to throw out a federal civil jury verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll. This marks the second rejection of Trump’s challenge in the high-profile case, after justices first declined to review the ruling back in June.
Carroll, an 82-year-old former magazine columnist, first brought the civil suit against Trump, alleging he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store fitting room in the mid-1990s. The defamation charge stems from a 2022 post on Trump’s own social platform Truth Social, where he denied Carroll’s allegations and claimed she was “not my type”, a statement the jury found defamatory.
Trump has steadfastly denied all wrongdoing in the case from the beginning. He has repeatedly argued that the trial judge improperly allowed damaging evidence that biased the jury against him, specifically the 2005 *Access Hollywood* footage where Trump used crude language to describe groping and kissing women. In July, Trump paid Carroll more than $5 million (£3.6 million) in damages as ordered by the jury verdict, though he has continued to challenge the ruling through the courts.
Following the Supreme Court’s latest decision, Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lead attorney, released a statement celebrating the outcome. “We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Kaplan said. She went on to confirm that the unanimous jury verdict finding Trump sexually assaulted and then defamed Carroll is now final, and cannot be appealed or challenged in any U.S. court.
The court published its decision as part of a routine order list released Monday, and offered no official explanation for why justices chose not to take up the case for review. Legal analysts note that Trump’s latest request for reconsideration after the court’s initial June rejection was an unusual, long-shot legal tactic, as the Supreme Court very rarely grants such second requests.
Trump has not yet issued a public comment on the latest ruling. After the court’s first rejection in June, he released a lengthy statement on Truth Social, vowing to continue fighting what he called a “weaponisation and lawfare case”, and dismissing the defamation claim as “ridiculous”. He went on to frame the case as an attack on American democracy, claiming “This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate”.
The verdict from the first case is now finalized, but Trump has a separate pending request before the Supreme Court challenging a second, larger civil defamation verdict. In that separate ruling, a jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83.3 million in damages for his continued public denials of the assault. Trump’s legal team argues that he has presidential immunity for statements he made while in office, and thus cannot be held liable for those comments. The Supreme Court has not yet issued a decision on that second challenge.