The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn a 2023 jury verdict that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.
The high court’s decision not to hear Trump’s appeal marks the president’s latest loss in a seven-year legal battle with Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine. It also leaves in place a $5 million jury verdict in Carroll’s favor that the president now has the legal duty to pay.
“This win is for every woman in the world!” Carroll said in an email to newsletter subscribers.
The legal dispute between the president and the writer began during Trump’s first White House term, when Carroll published a 2019 memoir in which she alleged that the president raped her in a New York City department store dressing room in the mid 1990s. Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he repeatedly insulted her while denying the allegation. Then, in 2022, Carroll sued Trump for sexual abuse and battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, a law that opened up a one-year window in which sexual assault survivors could pursue claims that were otherwise time-limited.
In May 2023, a jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. The verdict was upheld by appeals courts. This is the case the Supreme Court declined to hear when they convene in October for their next term.
In January 2024, as Trump made his third White House bid, another jury ordered him to pay Carroll $83.3 million for the 2019 defamation claims. A federal appeals court upheld that verdict last year. Trump has argued that it should be tossed out on the basis of presidential immunity since he was in the White House when he made the 2019 statements. He has not exhausted the appeals process in this case.
Trump’s Justice Department, which has been frequently deployed against his perceived political enemies, launched a criminal investigation into Carroll in May. Reuters reported that the investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testifying in both cases.
The Carroll case is the only one in which Trump has faced known legal consequences related to sexual misconduct, despite public allegations from multiple women made against him over the past decade. Some of those allegations were likewise related to incidents that dated back to the 1990s.
