The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it won't touch a 2023 jury verdict ordering President Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. While the court has handed Trump several key wins on challenges to his presidential actions, the refusal stings precisely because it's the first time since he returned to office that he's asked the justices to step into a personal legal fight, and they walked away from it.
Carroll claims, without any evidence, that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store back in 1996. She didn't go public until 2019, and when she did, she didn't go to the police; she put it in a book. Trump has always said the story was fabricated to sell that book, and everything she’s done since has just given credence to the accusations that she’s just a grifter.
Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to step in, warning that it's "deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic for President Trump, in the midst of a historic presidency, to have to take his focus away from his singular and unique duties as Chief Executive to continue fighting against decades-old, false allegations and the myriad wrongs throughout this baseless case."
They added, "This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand.”
Trump’s legal team also argued Carroll sat on her "implausible, unsubstantiated assertions" for more than two decades to "maximize political injury to him and profit for herself." They went further, pointing out that her account "precisely matches the plotline from an episode of one of admittedly her favorite TV shows, 'Law & Order.'" A story that lines up that neatly with a television script deserved more scrutiny than it got, and that's before you even get to the rest of Carroll's track record, including a paid walking tour that conveniently started at the exact spot she claims Trump attacked her.
Related: Now We Know Who Was Really Behind E. Jean Carroll’s Bogus Allegations Against Trump
But the key part of Trump's case wasn't about Carroll's lack of credibility. It was about what the jury never should have heard in the first place. His lawyers argued that jurors were wrongly allowed to hear testimony from two other women accusing Trump of assault, along with the 2005 Access Hollywood recording of Trump bragging about grabbing women. None of that evidence belonged anywhere near a trial about a specific 1996 allegation, and letting it in front of a jury all but guaranteed the outcome before the case even started.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals waved off those objections in 2024, ruling that "taking the record as a whole and considering the strength of Ms. Carroll's case, we are not persuaded that any claimed error or combination of errors in the district court's evidentiary rulings affected Mr. Trump's substantial rights." Now the Supreme Court has let that ruling stand without explanation.
This isn't even Trump's only Carroll headache. A separate 2024 jury ordered him to pay her $83.3 million over public statements disputing her account, a verdict that survived three separate appeals. His lawyers are now drafting a Supreme Court appeal in that case too, which was made possible by a special New York law that opened a limited window for sexual abuse survivors to sue over decades-old claims, a law tailor-made for exactly this kind of lawsuit, which Carroll helped make happen.
Carroll built an entire financial windfall on what was clearly a fiction, and the courts have signed off on every dollar of it. The Supreme Court had a chance to ask hard questions about evidence that should never have reached a jury. It chose not to, and Carroll cashes the check anyway.
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