President Trump — having failed to convince the Supreme Court to let him fight a verdict holding him responsible for sexual assault — continues to drag his heels in coughing up the $5 million he owes E. Jean Carroll, according to new court filings.
Writing late Tuesday to Manhattan Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the 2023 trial, Carroll’s lawyers said Trump had asked them to consent to a grace period while he mulled asking the Supreme Court to reconsider. Carroll’s team said no.
The nation’s highest court unanimously rejected the appeal on Monday, with nary a dissent from its Trump-friendly conservative supermajority. The justices did not include a reason for declining the case.
“This is the end of the line,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote Tuesday, asking the trial court judge to direct that the funds be released. “After four years of litigation across every level of the federal court system, it is time for this case to end.”
A Manhattan jury on May 9, 2023, determined Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll inside a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 and slandered her as a mentally unstable liar in various statements made in 2022.
Carroll, a former daytime talk show host and Elle columnist, provided extensive testimony about the violent attack she says occurred after a chance encounter at the luxury department store. Among 11 witnesses, she called friends she told in the aftermath as well as two women with accusations that Trump had sexually assaulted them in similarly spontaneous attacks. Trump skipped the trial to go golfing in Ireland.
The panel awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, which was secured in a court-controlled account the same week. The figure now amounts to almost $5.8 million after accruing interest.
Trump’s lawyers agreed the money would be paid out if and when he had exhausted his appeal options.
“The time for delay is over,” Roberta Kaplan wrote Tuesday. “Requiring Carroll to endure further delay while Defendant seeks rehearing would both be profoundly unfair and undermine the public interest.”
Carroll, an author, first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he disparaged her from the Oval Office and infamously denied the assault on the basis that Carroll was “not my type.”
That case was still waiting to go to trial when Carroll filed a second lawsuit in 2022, enabled to bring a sexual abuse claim following the passage of legislation in New York temporarily suspending the statute of limitations in civil sex crimes cases.
After the May 2023 trial ended in Trump’s defeat, a second jury calculated Trump owed Carroll an additional $83.3 million in damages for instances of defamation included in the original suit after hearing extensive testimony from Carroll about the torrent of death threats that followed Trump’s verbal attacks.
Trump is separately appealing the much larger judgment in a legal fight not yet before the Supreme Court.
The president has fought Carroll tooth and nail in the courts since she went public with her allegations, including by trying to dodge service of the complaint at Trump Tower and the White House.
Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll’s lawyer, has had little patience for the tactics, scolding Trump in 2022 for repeatedly slow-rolling his defenses and “asserting or inventing a new one each time his prior effort to delay the case fails.”
The president’s delay bid came the same week he publicly released his annual financial disclosure, showing he made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency holdings last year.
Trump’s attorneys and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.