SCOTUS Responds to Trump Push to Vacate $5 Million Judgment in E. Jean Carroll Civil Case

The Supreme Court has turned down a request by President Donald Trump to rehear the case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll, resulting in a $5 million verdict for her.

SCOTUS Blog reported that on June 29, the Supreme Court previously turned down Trump’s appeal in the 2023 case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million.

On July 13, Carroll received the $5 million, plus interest, after Trump exhausted his avenues of appeal.

His attorneys had filed a petition to rehear the case on July 8, which the Supreme Court denied Monday. SCOTUS Blog noted that the court rarely grants rehearings, the most recent instance being in 2018.

“Carroll filed the lawsuit at the center of the dispute in 2022. She alleged that in 1996 Trump had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a New York department store and then in 2022, after she went public with her assault allegations, defamed her,” the news outlet said.

Trump denied the allegation contained in Carroll’s 2019 book, calling it a politically and financially motivated hoax.

Strengthening Trump’s political weapon argument, New York passed a law in 2023, after he declared his candidacy, that created a one-time, one-year window for those claiming to be victims of sexual assault to bring their cases that fall outside the normal statute of limitations.

Carroll would not have brought her suit otherwise, because it allegedly occurred in the 1990s.

Further, CNN reported in 2019 that Carroll’s account of the sexual assault in a Bergdorf’s dressing room mirrored the plot of a 2012 “Law & Order: SVU” episode.

“It tickled me to death,” she told CNN at the time when this was pointed out to her. “It’s a great, huge coincidence, but it is a magnificent one, I must say.”

“It’s very ironic because ‘Law & Order’ happens to be one of my favorite shows,” Carroll said. “I love ‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent.’”

Finally, Trump argued in a 2024 social media post that Carroll at first said that she was wearing a dress that hadn’t been made yet

“She originally claimed that the ‘event’ happened in 1994, and that she wore the Donna Karan dress on that day. The problem is that New York Times Fact Checkers found the dress wasn’t even made by Donna Karan until long after 1994. The truth is that she doesn’t know the day, month, season, year, or decade — because it did not happen. End this Witch Hunt now!”

In a separate petition, Trump has also called on the Supreme Court to overturn a 2024 Manhattan jury verdict in a defamation lawsuit against him, which awarded Carroll $83.3 million, including $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million for her suffering.

Trump said during his first term as president that Carroll “was trying to sell a new book” that “should be sold in the fiction section,” and that her accusations were “totally false.”

In their petition, Trump’s legal team argued that in upholding the $83.3 million penalty, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to apply presidential immunity to his statements made during his first term.

The Supreme Court held in the 2024 case Trump v. United States that the president is entitled to presumptive immunity for official acts taken while in office when they fall outside his core responsibilities as president.

“This is the first case in our Nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a President for his conduct in office. Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the Second Circuit never even decided whether Presidential immunity applies to President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements — statements made from the White House, in response to press questions, denying allegations of personal misconduct, directly questioning his fitness for office,” the attorneys argued.

Trump’s legal team further stated that the Second Circuit “refused to apply presidential immunity even after this court recognized that ‘most of a president’s public communications are likely to fall comfortably within’ that protection.”

SCOTUS Blog reported that the Supreme Court is not expected to consider the petition until late September at the earliest, when the new term begins.

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