The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the president’s opinion on Monday donald trump A jury seeking to overturn a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll found he sexually abused the former magazine columnist and then defamed her.
The judges turned away Trump’s A lower court upheld a 2023 jury verdict and later appealed, rejecting Trump’s argument that the trial was unfair because the judge did not allow jurors to hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.
Trump has been feuding with Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, since she published excerpts from her memoir in 2019, in which she claimed Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan around 1996. Trump denies Carol’s and claims she lied about the allegations in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president and in 2022 when he left office.
Trump expressed disappointment with the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the appeal and called Carroll’s lawsuit a “sham case.”
“I will use all my strength and strength to continue to fight against the weaponization and legal cases against me, including ridiculous defamation accusations. This case is truly against the United States of America and everything it stands for and should never be allowed to happen to another president or candidate!” Trump wrote on social media.
Investigation into Carroll
Trump’s Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Carroll, as it has against several other opponents of the Republican president. The investigation, revealed in May, focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony related to two civil lawsuits won by Trump.
The case that resulted in the $5 million award related to Trump’s comments in 2022, when he called Carroll’s claims a “hoax” and a “hoax” in a social media post.
“This woman is not my type!” Trump added in the post.
Carroll sued Trump in Manhattan federal court. In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, awarding her $5 million in damages. They did not discover that Trump raped Carroll, as she alleged.
The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in 2024, ruling that evidence, including Trump bragging about his sexual prowess in an “Access Hollywood” video that appeared during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, established a “repeated and exceptional pattern of behavior” consistent with Carroll’s allegations.
Here’s what Trump’s lawyers told SC
Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that the trial judge “erroneously allowed testimony concerning decades-old, unsubstantiated and unrelated allegations to be presented to the jury” in defiance of federal rules governing the admissibility of evidence in the case.
“Carol waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, whom she opposed politically, until he became the 45th president so she could maximize her political harm to him and her own gain,” Carroll’s attorneys wrote in a filing.
In a separate lawsuit Carroll won in 2025, the Second Circuit declined to throw out an $83.3 million jury verdict in 2024 because Trump defamed her when he first denied her claims in 2019 and claimed she fabricated the allegations to sell her book.
