President Donald Trump reached the end of a long road gridlocked by appeals and must pay $5 million to E. Jean Carroll after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a civil jury’s verdict that he sexually assaulted her.
The nation’s highest court declined to take up Trump’s appeal of the May 2023 verdict at a Manhattan Federal Court civil trial, validating the findings of 12 New Yorkers who determined he was liable for sexual abuse and defamation, court filings show.
The decision unlocks $5 million awarded to Carroll, which Trump was required to deposit in a court-controlled account after the trial, where it has since remained, accruing interest.
The definitive loss for Trump in a case in which he’s invested significant legal resources comes more than three years after the trial and nearly eight years since Carroll, 82, first publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her inside a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Ave. in the mid-1990s.
In a statement on X, Carroll wrote, “This Win Is For Every Woman in the World!!”
Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said Trump’s quest to dodge accountability had been brought to an end.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said in a statement to the Daily News.
“His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed and today’s ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions.”
Trump, whose attorneys could not immediately be reached, is separately appealing the judgment finding him liable in Carroll’s original defamation suit and the subsequent $83.3 million award. That matter has not yet come before the Supreme Court.
The president took to his social media platform to vent his displeasure with the Monday decision, in part writing, “This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be! New York State created a Law, for an instant speck of time, going back many decades, in order to wrongfully ‘nab’ me. It was tailormade, and this Injustice cannot be allowed to stand!”
The law Trump referenced, New York’s Adult Survivors Act, enabled Carroll and thousands of people to bring claims against their alleged assailants by suspending the statute of limitations in civil sex crimes cases for one year.
Carroll was among the first people to bring a suit under the temporary law shortly after midnight on Thanksgiving in 2022. She had, by that point, been waiting years to bring Trump to trial in her original defamation case filed in 2019, which accused Trump of slandering her from the White House podium when he called her a liar and, infamously, said he didn’t assault her because she was “not my type.”
Carroll presented 11 witnesses at the sexual abuse trial, including former friends she confided in after the assault, one of whom urged her not to report it, and two women who alleged Trump had sexually assaulted them in similar attacks.
Carroll testified that the assault transpired after she and Trump bumped into each other in the luxury department store’s revolving doors and he invited her to help him pick out lingerie for a girlfriend. At the time, Carroll was a cable TV host of “Ask E. Jean,” an advice program named after her popular column in Elle. Trump was a real estate tycoon and a fixture in the tabloids.
The Indiana native said the situation went from “a funny New York scene” to a frightening one when they reached a dressing room on an occupied floor of the store, and Trump shoved her against a wall, banging her head, and forced his fingers inside of her vagina.
She testified that Trump then raped her, though the jury found that forced intercourse was not proven by a preponderance of the evidence.
Trump countersued Carroll for continuing to use the term “rape” in reference to the incident, but Judge Lewis Kaplan threw out the claim. The judge found the distinction between forcing one’s hand inside a person’s vagina without their consent and one’s penis was insignificant to the average person, writing, “Both are felonious sex crimes.”
Carroll told the court that she was never intimate with a man again after the assault, and that she had feared for her life in constant paranoia when Trump derided her to his fanbase as president.
Trump was initially undeterred by the verdict, defaming Carroll the next day on CNN. He has been more selective with his language since a second jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in January 2024.
