WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court for a second time refused a request by President Donald Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he had sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll.
The announcement Monday did not include the justices’ reasons, which is typical when the court issues routine orders. There were no noted dissents.
Trump paid Carroll in July, a few days after the court initially turned away the president’s appeal. He also made a long-shot request to the justices that they reconsider, which the court formally declined Monday.
The president has separately asked the Supreme Court to overturn a much larger award of $83.3 million that a jury ordered him to pay in 2024 for defaming Carroll in 2019, after she accused him of a decades-old rape. The justices are on summer recess and not expected to consider whether to take up that case until late September at the earliest.
The request the justices dispatched Monday was always a long shot, since they rarely reconsider when asked. Still, it was another in a series of blows to the president’s efforts to contest Carroll’s claims and avoid the two separate monetary awards that juries have ordered him to pay related to Carroll’s allegations.
In a statement, Trump’s legal team said: “The American people stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll hoaxes. President Trump will keep winning against liberal lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to make America great again.”
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said in a statement: “We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case. As a result, the jury’s unanimous verdict that Donald Trump sexually assaulted and then defamed E. Jean Carroll is now final and cannot be challenged in any court.”
The $5 million matter stems from a trial held in May 2023, when a federal jury in New York found the president liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
The jury agreed that Carroll, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently shown that Trump sexually abused her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store when the two crossed paths in the 1990s. Further, the jury found that Trump had defamed Carroll by posting a statement on social media calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” Throughout, Trump denied Carroll’s allegations.
After that verdict, Trump appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asserting, among other things, that the trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, erred by allowing certain evidence to be shown to the jury.
In December 2024, a three-judge appeals court panel upheld the jury’s verdict, finding that Trump failed to show that the evidence had harmed his rights to a fair trial.
Trump then asked the justices to weigh in and find that the trial court had erred.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.