By Andrew Chung
Aug 17 (Reuters) – Rebuffing President Donald Trump for a second time, the U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former magazine columnist.
The justices rejected Trump’s request to reconsider their previous decision in June denying his appeal of the 2023 jury verdict stemming from allegations that he raped her in the 1990s in a Manhattan department store’s dressing room. Trump’s lawyers contend that the trial was unfair.
The court’s order was unsigned and came with no explanation. The Supreme Court rarely grants requests for reconsideration.
The justices also are weighing the Republican president’s appeal of a separate $83.3 million jury verdict for defaming Carroll in 2019 during his first term as president, when he denied the claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations. Trump’s lawyers in that appeal argue that presidential immunity shields him from Carroll’s claims and that lower courts wrongly decided that he had forfeited that defense.
Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had raped her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump denied Carroll’s claims and asserted that she lied both in 2019 and again in 2022, while he was out of office.
The case that led to the $5 million verdict concerned Trump’s statements in 2022 when he called Carroll’s claim a “hoax” and a “con job” in a post on social media. Jurors in that case decided in 2023 that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, but did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
“We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement.
“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,” Kaplan said.
Following the Supreme Court’s denial in June of Trump’s appeal in the case, Carroll collected nearly $5.63 million from Trump. The payout represented the original $5 million civil verdict, plus interest.
In Trump’s request for rehearing, his lawyers said that the issue of presidential immunity in the case that led to the $83.3 million verdict that a jury reached in 2024 — which the justices still could decide to take up — could impact the 2023 verdict as well.
The Supreme Court in a landmark 2024 decision ruled that former presidents have full immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office that were within their core constitutional powers as president. The Carroll cases are civil lawsuits.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
Comments