Supreme Court again rejects Trump appeal in E. Jean Carroll defamation case

The United States Supreme Court closed a legal chapter on Monday that Donald Trump had tried repeatedly to reopen. For the second time in as many months, the justices declined to hear his appeal of a 2023 civil verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E Jean Carroll over allegations dating to 1996. The court's order came without explanation—standard practice when justices reject requests for reconsideration during recess—and it carried finality. The $5 million judgment, which had grown to roughly $5.8 million with accrued interest, is now beyond challenge in any court.

Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, first went public with her account in 2019 when she published an excerpt from her memoir. She alleged that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan three years earlier, in 1996. Trump's response was swift and dismissive. He denied the claim outright, called her a "nut job," and said she was "not my type." The denial itself became part of the legal record.

What followed was a tangled litigation spanning years and multiple courtrooms. In 2024, a jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a separate defamation case stemming from statements Trump made in 2022, when he called her allegations a "hoax" and a "con job" on social media. That verdict remains under appeal, with Trump arguing that presidential immunity shields statements he made while in office. But the case now settled by the Supreme Court's Monday order concerned an earlier phase of the dispute—the 2023 civil suit that established his liability for both the sexual abuse allegation and the defamation that followed.

Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, issued a statement emphasizing the finality. "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," she said. The language was precise: this was not a partial victory or a temporary reprieve. It was the end of the line for this particular appeal.

The Supreme Court's silence on the matter—no written opinion, no explanation of reasoning—reflects the routine nature of such denials. The court rejected 33 requests for rehearing in the same order. But the stakes in this case were anything but routine. Carroll has now secured two separate defamation victories against Trump, each rooted in the same core allegation from 1996 but litigated in different contexts and at different times. The first verdict, now final, established that Trump was liable for sexual assault and subsequent defamation. The second, still under appeal, awarded far larger damages but rests on different legal ground.

Trump's legal strategy has been to keep fighting, to appeal and re-appeal, to find some avenue through which the verdicts might be overturned or reduced. The Supreme Court's refusal to reconsider suggests that path has ended, at least for now. What remains is the $83.3 million judgment from 2024, which Trump continues to challenge on constitutional grounds. Whether that appeal succeeds or fails will determine whether Carroll's legal victories stand at their current scale or grow even larger.